yup, we taught all four to read phonetically with less and less effort as they came along, the youngest two being a year apart, learned at the same time.
Posted on 02/13/2011 4:44:10 AM PST by IbJensen
-six years ago, in 1955 to be exact, the most significant book about American education was published and, with very good reason, caused quite a stir. It was written by Rudolf Flesch, who had come to America to escape the Nazis in Vienna, became highly fluent in English and got a Ph.D in English at Columbia University. The book was entitled Why Johnny Can’t Read. It became a best-seller and rankled the entire education establishment. In it Flesch explained why so many children in American schools were having such a difficult time learning to read. He wrote:
“The teaching of reading - -all over the United States, in all the schools, and in all the textbooks - -is totally wrong and flies in the face of all logic and common sense.”
He then went on to explain how, in the 1930s, the professors of education changed the way reading was taught in American schools. They threw out the traditional alphabetic-phonics method, in which one learns how to sound out new words, and replaced it with a new sight, whole-word, or look-say method that teaches children to read English as if it were Chinese. He said that when you impose an ideographic teaching method on a phonetic reading and writing system you get dyslexia, or reading disability.
Flesch’s book was the first salvo in the Reading War, which is still going on over a half a century later. The progressive educators, who had introduced the new reading programs, were not about to give up their crusade to use the schools to create a socialist America. Their view, as first stated by their leader John Dewey, was that traditional phonics produced independent, individualistic readers who could think for themselves, while the new whole-word approach produced readers dependent on the collective for meaning and interpretation and were thereby easier to collectivize and control. And anyone who has visited a public school lately will become aware of how socialistic the curriculum has become.
In this socialist crusade, behavioral psychology would play an important role. For example, Dr. Paul Witty, professor of education and director of the psycho-educational clinic at Northwestern University, was interviewed by Nation’s Schools in July 1955. Flesch had singled out the professor as one of the whole-word gurus. So the magazine prefaced the interview with this paragraph:
“How does one tell a gullible public that it is being exploited by a biased writer — as in the case with Rudolf Flesch and his book Why Johnny Can’t Read? It will take time and patience for parents to learn that Mr. Flesch has mixed a few half-truths with prejudice to capitalize on two misconceptions. The first is his superficial notion as to what reading really is. The second is his misrepresentation as to how reading is taught.”
By now we know exactly what the progressives mean by “what reading really is.” The word method is now called Whole Language, and in 1991 three Whole Language professors wrote a book, Whole Language: What’s the Difference?, in which they defined what they mean by reading. They wrote:
From a whole language perspective, reading (and language use in general) is a process of generating hypotheses in a meaning-making transaction in a sociohistorical context. As a transactional process reading is not a matter of “getting the meaning” from text, as if that meaning were in the text waiting to be decoded by the reader. Rather, reading is a matter of readers using the cues print provide and the knowledge they bring with them to construct a unique interpretation.…This view of reading implies that there is no single “correct” meaning for a given text, only plausible meanings.
This is the kind of pedagogical insanity that now reigns in our colleges of education and has filtered down to the classroom teacher. Most parents assume that our educators are sane human beings who use common sense in their classrooms. Unfortunately, few if any parents have access to the writings of these so-called professors of education, and so are totally ignorant of the kind of crackpots who are educating their children.
Of course, back in 1955, the educators had every reason to denounce Rudolf Flesch because he put in jeopardy all of the new programs that were created to deal with the reading problems children were having as a result of the new teaching methods. An article in the May 1953 issue of High Points had described the new world of remedial reading which had come into existence:
Nearly every university in the United States now operates a “reading clinic” staffed by psychiatrists, psychologists, and trained reading technicians, and equipped with novel mechanical devices such as the metronoscope, the ophthalmograph, and the reading rate accelerator…. In addition, an entirely new professional group of private practitioners has arisen, whose specialized training in the field justifies their hanging out their shingles as “reading counselors” and rating large fees for consultation and remedial treatment.
So in addition to the education establishment and the new basal textbooks they wrote promoting the new teaching method, a whole new field of psychological therapy had developed to take care of children’s reading problems. Indeed, as early as 1944, Life magazine was writing articles about the epidemic of dyslexia among American children. The article stated:
Millions of children in the U.S. suffer from dyslexia which is the medical term for reading difficulties. It is responsible for about 70% of the school failures in the 6- to 12-year-age group, and handicaps about 15% of all grade-school children. Dyslexia may stem from a variety of physical ailments or combination of them-— glandular imbalance, heart disease, eye or ear trouble — or from a deep-seated psychological disturbance that “blocks” a child’s ability to learn. It has little or nothing to do with intelligence and is usually curable.
The article then went on to describe the case of a little girl with an I.Q. of 118 who was being examined at the Dyslexia Institute of Northwestern University. After her tests, the doctors concluded that the little girl needed “thyroid treatments, removal of tonsils and adenoids, exercises to strengthen her eye muscles.” No one suggested teaching her to read with phonics.
No wonder Flesch’s book hit a sensitive nerve among the educators, psychiatrists, psychologists and “reading specialists.” They all had an economic stake in the continued use of teaching methods that produced these thousands of affected children.
The result of Flesch’s book is that it awakened many parents who then began to teach their children to read at home. But the public schools continued to use the teaching method that continued to produce reading disability. And by now the full story of the deliberate dumbing down of the American people has been fully documented by such books as Charlotte Iserbyt’s the deliberate dumbing down of America and John Taylor Gatto’s monumental, The Underground History of American Education.
And yet most American parents continue to put their children in the government schools where the dumbing down curriculum is still in place and does its job of destroying their children’s ability to become good readers and successful human beings. And yet, the idea of reforming the public schools still resonates among the public who constantly approve of the government’s efforts of reform by throwing billions of dollars at the educators.
But Flesch knew how difficult the job of reform would be. He wrote:
It’s a foolproof system all right. Every grade-school teacher in the country has to go to a teachers’ college or school of education; every teachers’ college gives at least one course on how to teach reading; every course on how to teach reading is based on a textbook; every one of those textbooks is written by one of the high priests of the word method. In the old days it was impossible to keep a good teacher from following her own common sense and practical knowledge; today the phonetic system of teaching reading is kept out of our schools as effectively as if we had a dictatorship with an all-powerful Ministry of Education.
And the situation today is about the same as it was back in Flesch’s day. My contacts in the teaching field tell me that not much has changed since 1955, despite the fact that many books have been published since then corroborating Flesch’s findings. But it seems that only the homeschoolers have bothered to read them.
Back in the 1970s when I became aware of what was going on in the schools, I decided to write a phonics reading program that could easily be used by any parent to teach their child to read at home. I eliminated the use of any pictures and simply taught the student our English alphabetic system in a rational, systematic way. Its title is Alpha-Phonics. By now it has been used by thousands of homeschooling parents quite successfully, proving beyond any doubt that we can restore high literacy to this country if the will to do so is there. Unfortunately, it isn’t among the educational establishment.
Meanwhile, just about everyone who reads a newspaper knows that we still have a severe reading problem, which is not helping our country compete with all of those students learning English in China, South Korea, Japan, and India.. Indeed, the National Endowment for the Arts was so concerned about our declining literacy that they conducted their own survey which was released in November of 2007 entitled “Reading at Risk.”
According to the Report, the number of 17-year-olds who never read for pleasure increased from 9 percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004. About half of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 never read books for pleasure.
Endowment Chairman Dana Gioia stated: “This is a massive social problem. We are losing the majority of the new generation. They will not achieve anything close to their potential because of poor reading.” The survey found that only a third of high school seniors read at a proficient level. “And proficiency is not a high standard,” said Gioia. “We’re not asking them to be able to read Proust in the original. We’re talking about reading the daily newspaper.”
Well, as you can imagine the Report had as much influence on our educators as Flesch’s book of 1955. By the way, Flesch wrote a new book in 1983, Why Johnny Still Can’t Read. That book was totally ignored by the educators, who had so completely solidified their control over reading in the schools, that they couldn’t have cared less about what Flesch had to say in his new book.
I looked at the Korean alphabet once. About the time I encountered the fifth letter for the sound my American ears heard as eh, I gave up.
Incidentally, Latin is so impoverished in vowels that we had to force each vowel to work double-shifts, and have at least two different sounds. While the most common vowel in the English language, the schwa (think of the sound between the b and l in able) doesn't have a letter to its name!
Bravo, Sir!
“... cause they don’t teach Phonics anymore?”
My older two were taught to read prior to kindergarten. I used the Hooked On Phonics material. Both were reading at proficient 2nd to 3rd grade levels by kindergarten (I am also teaching my 4 year old currently). Today, the schools teach “see and say”. That is also why the kids can’t spell. One issue that I had with the school is “age appropriate” reading material. I had to go to war with the school librarian to allow my son to take out fourth and fifth grade level books in first grade. He was interested in History and those books were reserved for the older kids. Finally, I said that he was not going to be permitted by me to take out the books that were below his level. I would take him to the public library and forgo the school library. Then he was permitted to take out the books that interested him. Just a thought.
I’m the wife and couldn’t resist commenting on this thread, since I’m a teacher (at home), and have learned a lot as I endeavor to teach my own kids.
Another metaphor for reading theory is playing the piano, even though I don’t play any music, you learn the notes and fingering and then you can pretty much pick up anything and play it. Over time (and practice) it becomes easier, and you don’t have to focus on each note, but instead can look ahead and pick up a whole measure or line at a time. And can memorize pieces to play without looking at the sheet music.
Whole language is like teaching your kids to memorize one piece at a time(depending on their age, it might be Beethoven or Twinkle Twinkle Little Star), they can “feel out” how best they want to hold their hands to play that song. However, without the foundation of knowing the individual notes and proper fingering, you cannot just pick up another piece and play it, you would need to start from the beginning again and memorize it. Obviously, you would already know some parts, because you have done it before, but it would take much longer and become quite tedious after a while. Eventually I think the person might give up out of frustration, and learn to be satisfied just listening to the music. I think that people would give up sooner with whole language than with phonics, if that’s all that was taught.
Where it came from is the idea that America is a “melting pot,” and so many people believe our language is only half of English and the other half a mix of other languages. Thus we “need” to use different ways to learn to read all these different words. When actually, there are 36 simple rules to remember and about 72 different sounds, and that takes care of about 95 percent of all our words. Yes there are more detailed rules than that, and there are lots of words that come from other languages, but overall many of our words come from the same roots (Latin and Greek). So you learn that our words don’t end in the letter i or u, and that if we see a word like that, we know it might not follow the standard rules, but the rules give us somewhere to start.
Learning is all based on the individual and what’s best for that person. I saw that with my kids. Any setting that tries to generalize learning is bound for success only in limited amounts.
Please consider becoming a teacher when your children are grown.
I became a teacher at the age of 42. It’s a wonderful career in middle age, when you can bring lots of experience into the classroom along with measured responses to the emotional upheavals of children.
Your writing sparkles with intelligence and wisdom. Your kids are lucky. Other kids could benefit from you as well. Yes, the system is a socialist nightmare, but that doesn’t have to be the description of your classroom. Please think about what I’ve written here.
yup, we taught all four to read phonetically with less and less effort as they came along, the youngest two being a year apart, learned at the same time.
Phonics is how we learned to read. Once they get some of the blending of sounds, there are ladder words to memorize that aren’t phonically correct but simple to them as they go on. I think the lesson here is that the parents have to do it at home prior to sending them off to school. Plain and simple. If someone doesn’t do that then the child will struggle from kindergarten on. I am amazed once they get the sounds and the blending, they sort of shoot off like a rocket with speed. Other kids are still struggling while the ones who learned phonics early are just advancing every day. Just a thought.
wat r u tryin 2 say?
bump
“I looked at the Korean alphabet once. About the time I encountered the fifth letter for the sound my American ears heard as eh, I gave up.”
Thats an issue with your ear and not the language ;)...
I have trouble hearing the differences as well but I know people who are comfortable in the language they all have completely distinct sounds.
Unlike English where not only do some vowels do double duty... But some sounds have Multiple Assignments
Long E and (sometimes) Y: My Parents named M*e* Bobb*y*
“wat r u tryin 2 say?”
Took me a minute! i iz say-n reedin iz gudd. LOL
After I discovered he could read, I handed him to his teenage sister and said, “Do something with Pat,” beause I had a new baby and a bunch of other kids. Anoreth let him read all her high school textbooks, and he discovered in Church History that the early Christians used Greek. “If we do not speak Greek, we are heretics!” he announced, in his ferociously dweeby way, so I got him “Hey Andrew, Teach Me Some Greek!” and we started learning it.
He’s 9 now, and we’re in Book 4 of Greek and Book 1 of Latin. I wouldn’t let him start a second classical language until he could write independently, which didn’t happen until last year. (And then I found the first two books on clearance.) This is also the first year I’ve been able to let him go to a Sunday School class I’m not teaching, because he’s mastered the concept that nice children don’t call their teachers heretics.
Johnny can’t read because Johnny isn’t Johnny. He’s Mohamhed, Mustafah, Juan, Jose and all the rest or system has been forced to teach in their native dialects.
Good.
Better: i iz sayn redin iz gud.
Works like a champ. For a few years I was a reading tutor at a Middle Grade school helping laggards come up to grade level. We had some books in the room but we told the kids they could bring in any other book they were interested in. Quite a few brought in those by Goosebumps. They came up to speed pretty fast.
Second, that “if” whole language failed because it had not been applied *extensively* enough—an obvious logical fallacy.
Third, that *if* whole language failed, it was only because it had been starved for funding, that throwing money at it would make it work.
And finally, their fourth argument was that whole language *would* have worked, but that it had been *sabotaged* by nefarious people, including teachers, parents and others, who either did not want the children to succeed with whole language, or who supported the evil and corrupt (capitalist?) system of phonics English language instruction.
Wow, that's the progressive argument for every single one of their abysmal failures. Thanks for the great post.
Excellent! Teach a child in the way he should go...
I like to emphasize that your verse says, “The way HE should go,” and that the way for one child may not be the way for another. Patrick’s way may lead to a rarefied academic career, while Anoreth is a sailor and Sally is likely to marry pretty young and have lots of children.
dudUUUUUUHhhhhhdayieee du duh duh duhhhhhhhhh
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