[luvbach1]

...literacy rates went up and up, until about 1935. That was when progressive educators discarded phonics and forced Look-say into the public schools. (This method made children memorize the shapes of words, while ignoring the letters and their sounds.)

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."

[BruceDeitrickPrice]

Schools in US vary quite tremendously, even neighborhood to neighborhood. I have to generalize.

Behind closed doors, many teachers saved people from Whole Word—perhaps you were one. And never forget: the smarter kids figure it out; the slower kids are destroyed.

The Terman-Walcutt book in 1958 studied school districts 25 miles apart that were doing opposite methods. Amazing. Even as Whole Word gained a stranglehold, there were always islands of sanity. But the IRA was able to pretend that phonics didn’t work. (If you want more, Google “30: The War Against Reading.”

[Oztrich Boy]

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."

Looky-Sayey was there, it was just that your teachers had still learnt by phonics and were still instinctively applying those methods.

But "Dick and Jane" is the whole word system: Books structured to use only those words the child is scheduled to be "taught to recognise". You don't imagine any child would read those books for entertainment, do you?