Posted on 03/30/2012 12:29:01 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
[More about Sight-Words...] Your average criminal has a few aliases. It’s de rigueur in the underworld.
But only real swashbucklers pass the half-dozen mark. Think about the confusion keeping your identities straight. Down South you’re Jackson Jones, but in New York you answer to Maxie Smith, however, guys in Atlantic City call you Lefty,” as in, “Yo, Lefty, still doing hits?”
Which has to remind us of Whole Word, one of the greatest swashbucklers since Charles Ponzi’s business plan. This wise guy--I mean Whole Word-- came into the world as Look-say, with a few early aliases such as Word Method and Memory Method. Only when Look-say developed an unsavory reputation (something to do with those millions of kids who couldn’t read) did it become Whole Word, which later mutated into Whole Language. Along the way, it was also known as Dolch Words, Fry Words, Instant Words, and Sight Words. As these names became dreck on the market, the experts started jabbering circa 2000 about the wonders of Balanced Literacy.
All these aliases serve the same purpose that aliases always serve. You are not supposed to remember that you know this con artist. The alias says: “I’m not Look-say, that SOB. I’m Whole Word. I’m new in town. I'm a good guy.”
Note that Balanced Literacy still tells parents that children should memorize their Dolch Words and sight-words. You can find literally hundreds of sites promoting this approach. Not that it works. In the US, two-thirds of elementary school children are below proficient in reading. The official dogma keeps falling into disrepute. What to do? Here’s the answer that our ed commissars keep resorting to: why don’t we shift to a new alias? Maybe nobody will notice.
Suddenly, around 2010,...dozens of websites began touting “high frequency words.”...
(Excerpt) Read more at canadafreepress.com ...
Today, the government schools work hard to make sure that many people have no significant ability to read, and no love of learning.
It's by design.
Why go to all the trouble of this look-say crap when you can easily teach a kid to read by simply showing him the letters and telling him their sound equivalents? Start at three or four years old and by the time the kid is six, he’ll be reading anything, and doing it fluently. His reading ability will lead to increased comprehension and snowball into an impressive wealth of knowledge by the time the look-say kids are just getting over their struggles with Dick and Jane.
Bingo! Why are demscum so against school choice? Same reason. They WANT and NEED an uneducated illiterate voting base!!!
Yes, I’m sorry to say this is the almost inescapable conclusion.
Many people hate to use the word “conspiracy.” But the existence of 50,000,000 functional illiterates suggests that our Education Establishment is hugely incompetent OR hugely subversive.
As some wit has suggested: “Nobody’s that incompetent.”
We taught both of our children to read when they were three years old. We used the “Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons” book. That book was based entirely on letter sounds as well as letter-pair sounds.
Some kids get past the sound it out stage so quickly it’s hard to know whether they ever went through it.
These kids can probably learn to read by these methods just fine.
But they would probably learn just fine without anybody actually teaching them. Personally I cannot remember not knowing how to read. My mom has a picture of me at three totally absorbed in a book, and not a picture book.
The problem is the kids that need phonics to learn how to read properly. And they don’t get it.
What apparently didn't occur to him was that after sounding out a word three or four times, it is memorized (automatized might be more precise.) And, thus, an academic pinhead created the system that has condemned millions of people to poor reading.
To skip the memorization of about 41 sound/letter combinations, these geniuses proposed memorizing the entire language. And most of the education establishment fell right in line behind them.
John Dewey and his circle of followers will be regarded by future historians as evil men.
Ken Goodman, the whole-word guru, trained hundreds of teachers at the University of Arizona. I had the extraordinary experience of meeting one who got his M.A. there under Goodman. We met over dinner at a mutual friend’s house, and after a few drinks, he boasted about the Goodman method. After a little prodding he admitted that their technique was not meant to teach all kids to read in first grade. The purpose, he claimed, was to weed out those children who could not learn under the whole word method so they could be routed to the Title I classes in remedial reading.
Why? Apparently this was some kind of half-baked plan to increase the army of remedial reading teachers needed by each school district.
Not unlike the Chinese language where the symbols represent entire words and not combinations of more atomic characters.
I have always wondered about Ken Goodman’s motives. I’m pretty sure he’s smarter than I am. If I can figure out that his ideas don’t work, surely he can! Ergo, he has to know he’s a con artist.
Your story is spectacular. And suggests spectacular evil. Are there any more details you can recall? Why would the guy boast? Did he know the plan was “half-baked”? If so, why would he be part of it?
Read up on the work of Charlotte Iserbyt. She has a website, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, full of horror stories from the highest level.
Bump for later Saturday reading.
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