When the Education Establishment introduced Look-say circa 1935, there was only a rickety scaffolding of theory to justify this drastic move...The experts had done no rigorous testing. But by 1955, most of the nation’s children had been used as guinea pigs, thereby producing a vast library of gloomy data. That’s why 1955 is a pivot point. The educators had to know, even without Flesch, they were destroying children and decreasing literacy; but they went right on.
Flesch was stunned by these developments... He naively assumed that once the problem was explained, everyone would work together to change course. The opposite happened. He was in a war.
In 1958 two pro-phonics researchers published “Reading, Chaos and Cure,” a book that gives us a vivid sense of the period following Flesch’s book, as scandal morphed into crime. The authors (Terman and Walcutt) present a lot of statistics and anecdotes contrasting school districts using phonics versus those using Whole Word. They report that when reading is properly taught, virtually every five-year-old easily learns to read. These two experts were optimistic that the tide was turning, that everybody had to embrace the obvious solution, phonics.
Wrong again. The Education Establishment was actually able to discredit phonics and to keep Whole Word as the common way to teach reading from the late 1950s to 2000, despite declining literacy and a tsunami of weird mental and emotional problems such as dyslexia and ADHD.
Circa 2000 the Education Establishment retreated to the extent that they embraced a watered-down method called Balanced Literacy. But they were still forcing sight-words (also known as Dolch Words) into the first grade. So, from “Why Johnny Can’t Read” to now, that’s 55 years of unremitting stupidity and malfeasance.
If these people are ideological fanatics, everything makes perfect sense. Or If they are the most greedy little careerists ever. Or if they are the biggest fools in the universe. Unfortunately, none of these people has made a confession, so we don’t know for sure. My own guess is that the people at the very top had to be far-left ideologues. Nobody else could do to millions of children what these people did.
I tend to think that the bureaucrats in the middle and at lower levels were like guards in German prison camps: carrying out orders, trying to be good soldiers.
Whatever the motives, the damage that these people did is vast. The figure typically used is 50 million functional illiterates.
American public schools became a twilight zone where common sense was sent into exile, and millions of children had to endure years of suffering as they slowly accepted the idea that they would never read a book. (Everyone else seems to read easily--that’s what makes it so devastating for the victims.) They might work another 50 years as second-class citizens, deprived in an operational sense of 5 to 15 IQ points, working at jobs a level or two below what should have been.
Remember, Whole Word not only hides from you the right way to read, it gives you a lot of bad habits that permanently prevent you from understanding your affliction or figuring a way out of it. Poor readers assume they were born without, so to speak, the reading gene.
People who can’t read can rarely be successful in our society. So the reading conspiracy, with its attendant plague of illiteracy, is for me clearly the greatest crime in American history. So many millions of victims, over so many decades, the crime and its dolorous effects occurring anew each day, dragging down the entire society.
What is a bigger crime?
(For more about reading, see “42: Reading Resources” on Improve-Education.org.)
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Why not just post it here?
Are we your free blog hit supply or what?
I taught 1st grade in Boston from 1954-1956.
Phonics was used to teach reading.
When my own kids attended school in another city in the 60’s and 70’s phonics was out.
I asked how do you read a word that you've never seen before? he said “well then you sound out the letters”
and I asked him “How if you've never learned phonics???”
He assisted it was slower to sound out every syllable of every word- I had to explain that after you learn phonics and see a word a million times then you no longer are sounding it out, but doing your own ‘look-say’ by experience- but you never get that experience if you never learn phonics in the first place
This can ONLY be a liberal progressive attempt to undermine literacy
I don't get it. I attended elementary school from 1943 until 1951 in Chicago, learning to read quite well by the late 40s. I don't recall being taught by the "whole-word, look-say method." I distinctly remember first learning the sounds of the letters of the alphabet and then sounding out the first words I read in "Dick and Jane."
OTOH, you can't really teach Whole Word, not explicitly, just the way I learned it, so when my husband and I taught our children, it was phonics, rhymes and alliterations - and whatever Whole Word snuck in from reading out loud. Thnnk goodness it was not Danny very often, usually Are You My Mother?
Alex - I’ll take “what is the Fed?” for a hundred trilion.
I was taught the alphabet at home and thankfully learned phonics at school. I started reading the newspaper by age six. My stumbling block was New Math. My mother taught me how to do long division the old fashioned way.
I want to scream at the TV whenever I see those “Your Baby Can Read” commercials. My Mom learned to read by using the “Whole Word” method and it has been a huge frustration her throughout her life. She can’t figure a word out if she hasn’t seen it before so she ends up replacing it with a word that looks similar. Needless to say, that doesn’t work. Then she gets frustrated because it doesn’t make any sense.
I was taught with the phonics method and it’s what I used to teach my kids. Both were reading at extremely high elementary levels even before entering kindergarten and college levels before they entered middle school.
Phonics is the only system that makes logical sense to me. As noted above, using Whole Word, how can you know a word if you’ve never seen it before?
You are so right. People don’t know what their kids aren’t being taught. All “whole word” does is provide employment for remedial reading teachers. The so-called schools of education at our universities should be burned down.
I talk good too.
When my oldest son was in first grade his teacher called and told me he was having difficulty with his reading. Since they didn’t send homework home I stopped into his class one morning to see what was going on. In those days they would let parents into the classroom unannounced. Within about 60 seconds I understood the problem...whole word technique.
When the child got home that afternoon we immediately started our tutoring on reading that lasted almost every evening for 4 years. My mother had been a teacher so I had some very old textbooks. The boy learned very well.
Imagine my amazement one day when the older son was at school and the 2 1/2 year old brought in one of his story books and said, “Mom, I’m going to read this to you.” And, he did. He stumbled over the word “tow” pronoucing it as if it rhymed with “cow” but other than that got every word right. So, I got another book from a box that I knew he’d never seen or had read to him. Again, he read it almost perfectly. He’d picked up reading just by watching the tutoring lessons. I am a firm beliver in phonics to start. Whole word is fine once the reader has become more experienced.
On the other hand, 1955 or thereabouts was when just about every household got a TV. My mother, who was a teacher, always blamed the downward trend on that, wouldnt have a TV in the house.
Very interesting article. All this nonsense makes a lot more sense once you understand that “public education” as we know it has never been about educating young people in this country.
But ...more to your point is the FACT that, their trying to no-longer teach Cursive "long-hand" writing or reading.
What better way to turn the United States youth into "Slaves" and destroy this country!!???!
The biggest crime in America was the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank.
There’s an excellent chronology of research and publications
proving your claim at thephonicspage.org , “Reading History”
Brain imaging research is now feasible, that’s one recent
item. Rudolf Flesch’s update c. 1981 Why Johnny *Still*
Can’t Read is better than the original IMO. It has one
conclusive argument agains the whole word folks: Kurzweil
machines. These are the machines that read books to visually
impaired people. English has rather more rules, but reading
English is rule based. Machines can’t use intuition, they
need rules.