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.
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.
Not unlike the Chinese language where the symbols represent entire words and not combinations of more atomic characters.
Bump for later Saturday reading.