Posted on 11/16/2010 3:16:10 PM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
Think of this as a nice little time capsule from 50+ years ago....A review of "Reading: Chaos and Cure" just placed on Amazon:
A wonderful and informative book I can heartily recommend to any parent or teacher. You learn a great deal about reading, for example, why Sight Words are a hoax, why phonics works. The authors state: "It is absurdly easy to teach a child to read with the proper method. Most of the children in America could be taught in a few weeks or months at the age of five. We shall tell you about various schools, now functioning, where a problem reader is virtually unheard of." Take that, International Reading Association. Take that, International Dyslexia Association.
The book gives us historical perspective on the reading crisis. The book appeared three years after Rudolf Flesch's "Why Johnny Can't Read." We learn about the abuse heaped on Flesch, the many forces arrayed against phonics, and (what struck me as most poignant) the continuing optimism of the authors that the "educationists" would soon have to admit their mistake.
Remember that Whole Word was massively introduced circa 1932, about 25 years before this book appeared. In that fairly brief span, the Education Establishment subverted the methods used to teach reading and thereby sabotaged education generally.
The authors (Sibyl Terman and Charles Walcutt) sum up our dire straits in 1958:
"Because they have not successfully taught reading the educationists have by way of compensation altered the curriculum and indeed the whole concept of education to maintain schools in which, year by year, less use has been made of reading. It has come to a point where a young man can graduate from many of our major high schools, with superior grades, who not only cannot read successfully but also has not been called upon to do substantial reading in any subject. Meanwhile the educational specialists rationalize. They now affirm that about one-third of our youth -- and, they emphasize, often youth of superior intelligence -- are congenitally unable to master the printed word. They have elaborated a program of `life adjustment' which begins with the assumption that, because more than half of our youth will not enter professions where learning and prosperity go hand in hand, these destined unfortunates should not be given the sort of liberal education that will make them unhappy with their modest lives. Public school administrators have gone so far as to assert that they look hopefully for the day when learning to read will not be considered more important than learning to sew or skate."
The authors, like Flesch, were wrong. Good sense did not prevail. Our Education Establishment dug in, doubled down, and beat the heck out of these cockeyed optimists.
From 1958 to 1998, Whole Word was propped up by some of the worst political hacks imaginable. The result was 50,000,000 functional illiterates. All this despite lucid books, such as this one, explaining every detail of Whole Word's failure.
The authors (brother and sister) seem like very nice people. They evidently traveled a great deal, to report on reading in different states, cities and school systems. The book includes a full phonics program.
------end review-------
For more reviews of books about education, Google "36 Important Books About Education," soon to go to 40!
I understand :-(
RE: cursive writing. Already there are adults who can only print. The Whole Word people needed to get rid of cursive because it meant every word had another shape to memorize.
Meanwhile, Don Potter—echoing Samuel Blumenfeld—insists that cursive makes learning to read much easier. (donpotter.net)
Montessori said kids should learn to write before they learn to read.
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