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.
My youngest is 29 next month, they said he was learning disabled in Math and reading....hubby wrote a simple math program for the old Commodore 64, electronic flash cards. Grades went from D’s to A’s in 6 weeks, a little of the board of education applied to increase Concentration.
Reading was my area...Dick and Jane style books, and a little of the board of education, and 6 weeks later grades were up to B’s. Had to teach CONCENTRATION before learning could begin.
Then when he hit 3rd grade the teacher stopped teaching the multiplication tables at 6 times.....she ran out of time. Again we ended up teaching him his math with electronic flash cards.
I’m assuming that in both instances you were dealing with the public school system?
As an aside, anyone who’s interested should read up on what’s happening in the DC public school system. Some teachers were fired because they couldn’t pass the tests they needed to pass in two years. Guess what? The teacher’s union got them reinstated - with back pay! LOL. Teacher’s unions are a big part of the problem. The whole system is loaded with incompetent, greedy fools who know how to scam a dollar from the taxpayer, but little else.
Take him out of that school asap.
Apparently you didn’t phinish the sintence. :)
John Dewey came along long before federal involvement in collectivist-socialist government schooling. Rudolf Flesch published his book in 1955. This is also long before federal involvement.
I have a question:
Where are the studies that **prove** children learn anything in Prussian-style, prison-like, socialist-modeled schools ( private or government). Hm? Where are the controlled studies?
I have asked this question many times over my years as a member of Free Republic. No “educator” has ever provided me with the studies or links that would show how much children actually learn in these socialist-modeled classrooms. I would think these controlled studies would be rather easy to create. Test the students before the class, an then a few hours later after the class.
My conclusion:
The only thing Prussian-style, prison-like schools do is send home a curriculum for the parents and child to follow in the home. The real work of learning is done in the home!
If you know of a successfully educated institutionalized child, that child has enjoyed the **SAME** home environment as a successfully educated homeschooler! The parents of successfully educated institutionalized children and homeschoolers are BOTH homeschooling! In the case of institutionalized children it is called “afterschooling”.
My conclusion:
If **ALL** of our collectivist government schools were shut down tight tomorrow, the **SAME** children who are being educated today would be educated tomorrow! Why?...
Answer: ...Because it is the **parents** ( who may get help from friends, neighbors, and relatives,) and the child himself who are doing the hard work of educating and learning, and this hard work is done OUTSIDE of the school.
My homeschooled children entered college at the ages of 13, 12, and 13. All finished all general required college courses and Calculus III by the age of 15. Two finished B.S. degrees in mathematics by the age of 18.
The two children who finished math degrees by the age of 18 were the youngest children ever admitted to our flag ship university. A full-page, full-color article was written about them in the university paper. My children have also been in the local paper, on occasion, as well. No “educator” has ever called us, contacted us, or in any way asked us how we, as a family, accomplished this. ( Yes, **NEVER**!) Plenty of homeschoolers have. Plenty of parents of successfully “afterschooled” institutionalized children have, as well.
In junior high "Middle School" (I felt sooo cheated when they changed the school name from Jr High to middle school the very year I went there, depriving me of the social cachet of being in Junior HIGH SCHOOL! ) they gave us another reading test : We were to hand them a book, they'd point at a line, and we'd read it. The *&%$###@s wouldn't LET ME read from War and Peace, a book I'd already plowed through twice! I was forced to fall back on 1984 . :-(
When schools fail, blame the parents.
When parents “afterschool”, the schools take the credit.
( sigh!)
He neglected that one of the biggest and most important American proponents of whole language was none other than Noam Chomsky.
As such, Chomsky has done more to “keep down” black Americans than anyone since Jefferson Davis.
When whole language was introduced into the US, black students, even in segregated schools, were almost on a par with white students in English proficiency, despite a large difference in prosperity and educational opportunity.
When whole language was introduced, white parents immediately reacted with things like hiring tutors, and white schools worked overtime to get failing students back on track. But black parents often did not have this luxury, nor were black schools as concerned about these setbacks.
So within 10 years, black English proficiency test scores plummeted, and soon dragged down the rest of their grades. This condemned them to lives of minimum wages and government dependency.
But due in large part to the advocacy of Chomsky, whole language became an article of faith with socialists, so despite voluminous evidence that it was an utter, total and complete failure, they still push for it in public schools.
To make matters worse, in the northwest they recently introduced the equivalent of whole language but for mathematics instruction. Within months it was an utter disaster, utterly rejected by parents, who had to spend a lot of money to get math tutors and special classes for their children, so they would not continue to fall behind their peers.
Importantly, from the onset, the arguments used by the socialists have been the same. First of all, that whole language had *not* failed at all, *despite* the objective statistics that demonstrated that it had failed.
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.
In any event, the next time, and any time, you see a black American living in despair and poverty, stripped of his or her dignity and future, criminalized and institutionalized, your first thought should be about how there is a good chance that Noam Chomsky is responsible for their condition.
He truly is “The anti-Martin Luther King”.
Great article. I’m 68 and was reading ever since “when”, learned by phonics and my dear late Mom’s encouragement and instruction.
She would take me to a public library which I learned was an adventure, not a punishment. If I checked out a book beneath my reading level she would usually comment, “That’s nice but it seems a little too young for you”. This shamed me to keep striving, not fall back on a level I was comfortable with. Such is the power of parents.
The mistake is the supposition that if some people can do this, everyone can.
I'm a fan of phonics. I learned to read with phonics; my grandchildren are being homeschooled with phonics. But your comment intrigues me much. It suggests that phonetics and whole language should complement each other.
Outside of my day job I teach dance and I coach racewalking. In those domains we often talk about visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning. Some people perform quite well when I simply say "do this" and demonstrate. Others need a description; most of those need me to break down the motion into its component parts. Some others need me to push an arm or leg into correct position.
Good teaching and coaching recognizes that different approaches may be indicated for different folks. Reading should not be excluded from that consideration.
NO!
In my case, yes.
In my son’s situation, it was an expensive Catholic school!
:(
“Most parents assume that our educators are sane human beings who use common sense in their classrooms. “
...and that holds even now. Talk to any home schooler and compare their results with any ‘wonderful’ public school...and it becomes OBVIOUS.
My whole family is eulexic, including me. I chucked phonics when I started the second grade and discovered I could plow through any book. I did not have the intellectual background to understand the content of any book, but could read them at ridiculous speeds anyway.
DOE..........period!
I taught my daughter how to read using Sam Blumenfeld’s ALPHAPHONICS. She was four years old, we did a chapter a day for 20 minutes a day. 3 months later, she could read any book I gave her. REAL Phonics works! ALPHAPHONICS sells for maybe 25 dollars. If I can teach my kid how to read, ANYONE can teach a kid how to read well.
I met Sam Blumenfeld a few years ago, and thanked him for teaching my daughter how to read.
Where are the controlled studies that prove where and how children acquire their knowledge?
It could be that we spend, as taxpayers, thousands of dollars per child to send them to prison-like schools, when the **real** work of teaching and learning is being done by the parents and child in the **HOME**!
Maybe the only thing our collectivist schools do is send home a curriculum for the parents and child to follow in the home.
For example:
Every day my daughter sits down with my grandson and drills him on math facts and spelling. She corrects his handwriting, and checks his projects for neatness and thoroughness. SHE is the person who taught him to read before he enrolled in school. She is doing everything that any successful homeschooling mom is doing. Who takes the credit for all **her** hard work? ...Of course! The school!
If every collectivist government school in this nation closed tomorrow the **same** children who are getting an education today would get one tomorrow. It is the parents and the children, themselves, who are doing the the hard work in the home!
Blumenfeld writes: "Flesch’s book was the first salvo in the Reading War, which is still going on over a half a century later."
Actually, Flesch's book was the first counter-attack in the reading wars that had already been going on for 20 years. And the failure to reform public schools over the past 50+ years tells you everything you need to know about government schools. They are unreformable. Give it up. The only effort ought to be to de-fund this socialist organization starting with the Department of Education at the Federal level. Don't send your kids to socialist indoctrination camps and encourage everyone you know to do the same.
Why would any loving parent send their children to the government schools to raise them?
That sounds about right.
Other than the very end, I had the same experiences. Except that I was a little more forceful as a child and so when the school librarian refused to allow me to check out an ancient Egyptian history textbook (for the same reason) when I was very young, I cracked it open on her desk and read it to her.
She then let me check out any book I wanted.
“When I was in school, in first grade I was placed in the “lowest reader” class. My parents were furious; I learned to read at 3 yrs old, and entered kindergarden at age four. They marched into that school and demanded a comprehensive reading test be administered to me. I was already reading at a 3rd grade level because my parents taught me phonics”
Given how far ahead you were it’s pretty clear that they were trying to ‘level the field’ and make sure that you wouldn’t hurt the ‘self-esteem’ of the other precious children. LOL.
My case was different, but pretty funny. My parents were clueless when it came to educating kids (it almost seemed that they never heard of kids until we arrived), so we were totally entrusted to our ‘wonderful’ public school. For whatever reason, I had a terrible speech problem just as I was at the age to learn reading. So, they made me practice sounds as part of the therapy...which meant PHONICS...so I learned the right way, but only by accident. My younger sister wasn’t as lucky and still struggles decades later.
I absolutely agree.
It’s the Cloward-Piven strategy applied to education.
And...There are plenty of teachers ( lowest SAT scores on campus) who are willing to be Useful Idiot warriors in the war against our nation.
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