Summary: Rudolph Flesch was right in 1955 when his wonderful book “Why Johnny Can’t Read” attacked Whole Word and promoted phonics. Our Education Establishment, which did the opposite, was wrong.

Happy Birthday. Cheers all around. Rudolph Flesch’s fabulous and justifiably famous work–“Why Johnny Can’t Read”–turned 55 in 2010.

Old? Dated? No longer relevant? Hardly, brothers and sisters. Flesch’s book is in the catbird seat, on top, in charge, totally triumphant.

Fact is, his egregious enemies make him look sooo good. Scratch that. They make him look like a Promethean genius. And for what? Simply telling the truth, namely:

English is a phonetic language. Letters stand for sounds. Learn which letters stand for which sounds and you got it. You are reading. B-E equals BE. C-A-T equals CAT. Wow, it’s so simple even five-year-olds get it. Professors of education are another matter entirely.

Flesch had to write a book stating the obvious because the Education Establshment had gotten lost in deep sophistry-space. No alphabet, they decreed. No letters! No sounds! Children have to memorize words by their shapes. What??! The teacher points at a configuration (e.g., “@#%”) and says, “Pronounce this ‘walk.’ Memorize the shape. No problem. Only 100,000 to go.”

Never forget. That was the dim-witted dogma from 1931 until quite recently. It was this dogma that devastated American literacy, causing tens of millions of functional illiterates. And a millon dyslexics. How? Because memorizing shapes is hard work; and not many people can achieve automatic recall of even 1,000 English word-shapes (all of which appear in multiple forms, for example, cat, CAT, Cat, etc.).

Here’s what happened in practice. Few people learned to read using sight-words (and they always describe reading as painful drudgery). The cleverer kids, after a few wasted years, would figure out the code and segue into phonics. The less verbal kids would Brand Viagra descend into the most abject kind of misery–being illiterate in a highly literate society. Imagine a boy of 10 or 12 who can’t read. You think he’s not angry? Crushed? ADD? Ready to commit crimes?

The Education Establishment insisted on selling us big vats of snake oil, paralyzing American education as a result. The dumbing-down that has afflicted our society derives, more than from any other factor, from school-induced illiteracy.

Rudolph Flesch wrote his wonderfully clear and accurate book to explain the hoax. He did a superb job. The book reads as if just published–forever young.

But you know what? The country’s elite educators dug in. They swore allegiance to the dark side. They ridiculed Flesch. They dismissed him. Actually, Flesch died in 1986 thinking he was a failure.

Fortunately, we had two brilliant men already working in the same area: Samuel Blumenfeld and Siegfried Engelmann. They and many others kept the truth alive, and today, phonics is more and more the norm, at least in good schools.

As for sight-words, whole words, Dolch words–they don’t work and children don’t need to hear the phrases ever mentioned.

As for Flesch, I nominate his “Why Johnny Can’t Read” as one of the great works of non-fiction in Americn history. Happy Birthday, Rudolph.

(For an introduction to reading, see “42: Reading Resources” on Improve-Education.org.)

Author Bio: Bruce Deitrick Price is the founder of Improve-Education.org , a high-level education and intellectual site. One focus is reading; see “42: Reading Resources.” Another focus is education reform; see “38: Saving Public Schools.” Price is an author, artist and poet. His fifth book is “THE EDUCATION ENIGMA–What Happened to American Education.”

Category: Education
Keywords: phonics, whole word, sight, dolch, look-say, dyslexia, illiteracy, dumbing down