Summary: An excellent way to learn about the Reading Wars. You\’ll meet one of the first and greatest fighters in that war.

Here’s how I happened to encounter Mary Johnston, the very model of what an educator and intellectual should be.

An upcoming book (“Planned Illiteracy in Australia?”) prompted me to search that intriguing phrase “planned illiteracy.” I found an obscure book titled “Programmed Illiteracy in our Schools” (published 1970) and ordered it.

Suddenly I was back in 1956, in far-off (for me) Winnipeg, Canada, and here was a young, shy housewife, mother of three and a piano teacher, about to enter history.

Mary Johnson had a student, 11 years old, who had learned to play the piano; presumably the girl had at least average intelligence. One day she showed up boasting that she had learned a new piece of music titled \”MINUET.\” Mary Johnson, stunned, pointed at the word at the top of the page and asked, “What does this say?” The big type read: MIMIC.

“Joan had been able to read the piece of music after only six months’ piano lessons, and yet she could not read the simple title after four and a half years of public schooling! Her mother told me that Joan is ‘doing well’ in grade 5 at school and that she read several library books each week.”

So began the wonderful and heroic saga wherein Mrs. Mary Johnson discovered how bad things truly were, took on the Education Establishment, and probably saved millions of children from illiteracy. First, she made certain her own children could read; learned all the theories; and then she began to present proposals to the provincial authorities. The people in charge of Canadian education massively counterattacked.

Now she was up against the education professors; the publishing companies who made so many millions of dollars on Dick and Jane books; and that lobbying group called the International Reading Association (IRA). You can imagine the sneer these people used in dismissing a housewife in 1957. And yet she just kept fighting. She should be a feminist icon.

The book records a 12-year battle to protect literacy in our schools. Of all the many excellent books about the Reading Wars, this might be the best. Only 170 pages long, it manages to be both intensely personal and high-scholarly. It shows you the kids, parents and schools struggling with look-say; the politicians ducking; the Education Establishment scheming for dollars and control.

And how did they intend to “program” illiteracy? Typically, when people try to explain the Reading Wars, they start off talking about the silliness of memorizing thousands of words as SHAPES or configurations. But Mary Johnson reminded me that there is an aspect more primal that needs to be focused on, and it’s all laid out in one short paragraph on page 77: “The publishers taught our teachers to regard Dick and Jane as a scientific, all-inclusive, delicately balanced teaching tool, not to be tinkered with by amateurs. It was frequently stressed that English was ‘not a phonetic language’ and that children did not need to be told the separate letter sounds. ‘Surely we don’t have anyone here who is old-fashioned enough to tell children the sounds of the letters!’ teased one consultant [from a publishing company].”

The plot, simply stated, was to make the alphabet disappear. Think about the audacity of this scheme. Letters are everywhere around us; but the geniuses of look-say wanted to create a landscape where the ABC’s would not be visible except as graphic elements inside word-shapes. To the degree these so-called experts can pull off this nonsense, kids become illiterate and dyslexic. The plot continues today. Public schools are at this moment forcing millions of five- and six-year old children to memorize Dolch Words. (The remedy is that parents teach their three and four-year-olds the alphabet and sounds. I call this “Preemptive Reading.” Nothing is more important.)

The most vivid memory I have of Mary Johnson’s cleverness is when she went to city parks and recruited kids to read for her. She tape-recorded their reading and then had the recordings played on local radio stations. And parents everywhere were stunned (and also relieved) to find that their child was not the only illiterate in town, that schools were creating massive numbers of kids who also stumbled, hesitated and guessed wildly.

Mary Johnson is famous for devising the simplest reading test of all. Children are asked to read these two sentences: “Mother will not like me to play games in my big red hat” and ” Mike fed some nuts and figs to his tame rat.”

Sight-word readers have no trouble with the first sentence; but they usually can’t read the second sentence without mistakes because these words haven’t been memorized; and the kids are unable to figure them out, despite the massive propaganda saying they can. Second-graders produce variations like this: “Mide fed some nits and fudge to him take right”

As much as I admire Rudolf Flesch and others, I have to say that Mary Johnson was perhaps more alone and needed greater courage and ingenuity for her fight against the huge army of quacks, hacks and flacks in control of public education. She was a Mama Grizzly before we heard the term.

My own conclusion about public education in the last 75 years is that it is a swamp of sophistries and lies, not to mention depravity. This book reinforces my conclusion.

“Programmed Illiteracy in our Schools,” which I reviewed on Amazon, is a book I would recommend to anyone; but it is now rare and expensive. So, in no particular order, here’s a further sampling of quotes from the book:

“In their search for an explanation of reading failure, it seemed that the experts focus their attention on the shortcomings of children, rather than on the method by which they were being taught. For example, in ‘Your Child Learns to Read’, Dr. Sterl Artley [a Dick and Jane author] used the personal problems of nine children to explain why ‘some reading problems do occur.’ The unfortunate youngsters described by Dr. Artley were, among other things, sub-normal, above normal, half blind, irresponsible, depressed, hostile, lazy, immature and slightly deaf. The solution to the problem, according to the experts, was to give individual tuition in the same methods which had failed to get results in the classroom.” [This gimmick was later enshrined in Reading Recovery.]

“These theories sounded plausible, but I was not convinced. Most of the children who had read aloud for me made so many mistakes and were so baffled by new words that I did not see how they could understand what they were trying to read. Reading, in fact, had proved to be such a laborious and frustrating task for many of the older children that they did not want to read at all.”

“The first person I talked to was a local teacher who had taken special courses in reading. I expected her to be interested in the test results I had accumulated, but she just seemed to be irritated by them. ‘I don’t know why you’re doing this,’ she said. ‘Some children are not ready for phonics and it is impossible to teach them.'”

Another educator told her: “‘Most people in Britain today who write about the teaching of reading,’ he wrote in a letter, ‘say the aspect to be taught first is a sight vocabulary of perhaps 50-100 words, and then the phonetic elements are extracted, systematized and practiced as need arises. This indeed is what a good teacher does, and the results are not in doubt.'” [This gimmick is now enshrined in Balanced Literacy.]

“The one factor which seemed to be common to all the trouble spots was the taboo, in teachers colleges, against the straightforward teaching of phonics. Even in far-off New Zealand a teachers college instructor insisted that separate letter sounds were ‘nonsense learning.’ We are quite against the return to direct phonics in the introductory stages of learning to read,’ she wrote. This educator supported her position by quoting the viewpoints of three American reading experts-all of whom were authors of basal sight method series, including Dick and Jane! All three of these authors were also on faculties of education at leading American institutions-and therefore in an influential position to further the interests of their publishers.”

Another revealing anecdote: “‘Quite frankly, Mrs. Johnson,’ the Chief Inspector told me in his office, ‘I’m not in the least interested in this controversy. I haven’t even read your brief to the Royal Commission. All I know about it is what I read in the newspapers and I don’t pay any attention to that. They always get things mixed up.”

“The specialists showed great enthusiasm for analyzing, and diagnosing and treating the reading problem-but not for solving it. ‘Where would we remedial teachers be,’ I overheard one gentleman say, ‘if it weren’t for all these poor readers?'”

“The editors of the Winnipeg Tribune had told me in 1957, ‘You make the news, and we’ll print it”-and they certainly kept their promise.” [Which is a dramatic contrast with the American newspapers I know about, where the Reading Wars are not explained.]

If there are any universities in Canada worth the name, Mary Johnson must have received a lot of honorary degrees. It was a great privilege for me to meet her.

[For more analysis of the reading crisis, see “42: Reading Resources” on Improve-Education.org.]

Author Bio: Bruce Deitrick Price is the founder of http://www.Improve-Education.org, an education and intellectual site. One focus is reading; see \”42: Reading Resources.\” Price is an author, artist and poet. His fifth book is \”THE EDUCATION ENIGMA–What Happened to American Education.\”

Category: Education
Keywords: Canada, feminists, reading, k-12, phonics, sight words, dolch, whole word, courage, illiteracy,