Episode 76: Dyslexia is a Fancy Word for Sabotage ... ... ...

Let's Fix Education, Episode 76, Transcript of podcast ^ | Dec 8, 2022 | Bruce Deitrick Price

[BruceDeitrickPrice]

Episode 76: Dyslexia is a Fancy Word for Sabotage =======================================

Ladies and gentlemen…

1: INTRODUCTION: every year our public schools spend more billions to help children become readers. But nothing works. Scores remain flat. The majority of children do not learn to be good readers Common sense tells you that your school officials do not know what they're doing. Don't let your children be sabotaged. Insist on phonics.

The official story is that a fifth of all children suffer from a brain disorder which they have named dyslexia. In fact, the phonics people say that so-called dyslexia is usually not real, being a side-effect of faulty reading instruction.

2: WHY SO MANY KIDS CAN’T READ: One of the most disturbing books in my local Kroger grocery store is called The Jumbo Book of Sight-Words. It’s big: 432 pages, roughly 8-1/2” by 11”. It’s expensive: about $18. It’s a toxic boondoggle, and a tragic monument to the decline and fall of K-12 education..

In 1955, Rudolf Flesch wrote his famous book attacking sight-words: Why Johnny Can't Read. This was a devastating deconstruction of the most dangerous method used in the public schools.

The US had almost universal literacy by 1920. Public schools introduced sight-words in 1931. Hardly more than 20 years later, the country was plunged into an illiteracy crisis that continues to this day.

3: THE BIG PROBLEM: only children with photographic memory can read with sight-words. The great majority of children can master only a few hundred sight-words. Some of the words can be identified only after a delay of several seconds while they drag the word up from memory). This slow process does not count as genuine reading. Real reading is at least two or three words per second.

Optimistic wisdom on the Internet dictates that fourth graders should know 500 sight-words or even 1000. Two problems. Only a tiny percentage can reach such levels, and even that is a huge struggle. Meanwhile, even by their own projections, most children will still be far from literate. Historically, children in fourth grade could read simple books intended for children. But American students are already moving into the category of functionally illiterate. They cannot read the books written for children to read.

4: PUT YOURSELF IN THE CHILD’S PLACE: you don't know the alphabet. You don't know the sounds of the alphabet. But you're supposed to remember graphic designs such as: their, yellow, pilot, brother, worry, and so on through the vast vocabulary of the English language, thousands and thousands and thousands of so-called sight-words.

English is a phonetic language and must be learned by sounds. But sight-words want you to learn by SHAPES. Truth is, all English words are remarkably similar, lots of little scratchy designs with circles and lines. Reflect for a few minutes on son, bit, lib, jot, lob, rib, lab, but, big, sub: can you memorize these with instant recall? You will surely confuse these with the next 10: joe, web, sit, bug, hat, sob, mob, not, cog, tub. Now consider that upper case and lower case are very different: compare the design details of and / AND. They are so different they seem to be from another language. (Bottom line: for kids learning sight-words, all the small words look pretty much the same. Teachers report third and fourth graders confusing to and the.

5: THE OFFICIAL LIES The sight-word deception, as I call it, depends on thousands of education experts insisting that sight-words are easy to memorize. But if you listen to the teachers discussing the problems they have with their students, you realize it's a nightmare for everyone—parents, teachers, and kids. Have you realized that Fauci and his people exaggerated the danger of Covid and made the disease look worse than it was.. There was definitely some cooking of the books at the very top.

We have the equivalent situation in our schools, where the professors of education somehow manage to find the worst methods.

6. NO DYSLEXIA. In 1981, Flesch published a second book called Why Johnny Still Can't Read. Flesch Interviewed a Manhattan expert on reading problems. This expert insisted that after decades of dealing with many different problems, it was clear to him that only a tiny fraction of people (less than one percent) had genuine inborn dyslexia. All the others were false positives generated by bad instruction. Use phonics and you won't have this problem.

In general, my research suggests that ALL the problems in our public schools are generated by so-called experts who just happen to be socialist ideologues. They won't do what has the best chance of working. No, they insist on using bogus theories and methods. Dishonest and disgusting, don't you think?

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Send this to everyone in the school system. Also send it to parents.

Also see video titled "The strange truth about dyslexia” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeFLLnRWROQ

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[skr]

We’re about the same age then. My school years started in the mid ‘60s. I never heard it called phonetics. The two words are somewhat related, so I can see how they could be confused, but they are not synonyms for each other. I checked the definitions first because I didn’t recall phonetics ever being used to describe my elementary school reading courses.

I recall the color-coded SRA Reading Laboratory in third grade, a self-paced program. Absolute bliss, could read as much as I wanted to and didn’t have to wait for the other students.