The single most important aspect of education is reading. If children are not reading, their entire education comes to a halt. That’s what has happened in millions of lives. All the statistics for many decades reveal a curious surprise: our public schools don’t actually know how to teach reading or, more likely, they pretend not to know. This is a bizarre scandal, especially given that children have been learning to read for thousands of years, and 100 years ago this country was thought to be moving toward universal literacy. An odd thing happened circa 1931. The Education Establishment pushed look-say (or...