LET'S FIX EDUCATION -- by -- Bruce Deitrick Price
Episode 131 -- Wednesday, Jan. 3, 2024
Please! Can we stop the dyslexia nonsense?
Dyslexia is the most commonly used word in our K-12 system. What does this tell us? Dyslexia means confusion with reading, so we know our Education Establishment still has not figured out how to teach reading. This is odd and scary. A century ago, we had almost universal literacy.
Let's play Sherlock Holmes. Is there a crime here? Who is committing it?
Here’s my answer. Dyslexia is a scam from beginning to end*. The Education Establishment uses a method that doesn't work, generally known as sight-words. As a result, there are many damaged and illiterate children. How do you cover up your crime? Easy. Blame it on a mythical disease called dyslexia.
Dyslexia, you see, is the all-purpose alibi, excuse, and get-out-of-jail-free-card. The professors haven't done anything wrong. It’s just bad luck that millions of children somehow end up messed up.
One of our real educators was Siegfried Engelmann who summed up the matter this way: “One of the greatest myths perpetrated by the establishment is dyslexia…. There is precisely nothing wrong with the dyslexic kid except the teaching failed…” Think about that.
Here are the big events that define our national nightmare. In 1931 the public school system suddenly outlawed phonics, and has been on a downward trend ever since. However, three years earlier Dr. Samuel Orton completed a field study which concluded that sight-words do not work. Equally bad, they will ruin the child for life.
Orton was a neurologist, a real scientist. Orton was shocked by his own findings and warned that: “faulty teaching methods may not only prevent the acquisition of academic education by children of average capacity but may also give rise to far reaching damage to their emotional life."
During the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, when sight-words were enforced in the schools but didn’t increase literacy, the heavy thinkers pushing sight-words came up with lots of psychoanalytic explanations instead of admitting the role of sight-words. It was easier to slander the parents as alcoholic, mentally deficient, et al. Point is, professors claimed that illiteracy was not caused by sight-words. But it was.
Years later Samuel Blumenfeld, another of our great educators, wrote a short booklet titled: “Dyslexia: The Disease You Get In School.” Notice there's no mention of defective brains or any of the other clichés. The cause is the school!
Here's what ruins all the giddy theories. In the 1930s the educrats told parents that the children would routinely learn—that is, recognize on sight — 600 or 700 words each year. Problem is, people need a near-photographic memory to retain all those words, but only a small percentage have that.
History shows that each year goals were reduced, to 500 words a year and then 300. By the 1960s they were down to less than 100 per year, a joke compared to early claims. For ordinary kids, the realistic goals are around 50.
Do the math. Even the most successful students, at the end of high school, have learned only a fraction of English words needed for real literacy. Proving that sight-words were never a genuine option for students learning to read.
So the professors settled on 20% as dysteachia’s failure rate. One in five children are doomed to bad reading. Whenever the school officials have to deal with a worried parent, they can claim, well, we shouldn't be surprised if your kid has dyslexia, because a fifth of them do!
This whole thing is a scam and a bad joke. Kids won't get dyslexia or reading problems unless you force them to do the impossible, i.e. memorize thousands of sight-words.
Kids are told to guess and skip ahead. This guarantees constant confusion. Words may appear to move. You may got the first word, the fourth word, the seventh word, and so on. You jump back-and-forth from the things you know. Everything becomes a blur, which is the essence of dyslexia.
A famous phonics expert said, the real problem is not dyslexia but the teacher’s flawed instruction. Dyslexia should be called dysteachia.
There are several million children in our public schools at this minute who are being defeated by sight-words. Don't let it happen to anyone you know. (See "breakthrough articles" on Intro page.)
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Important historical perspective
Rudolf Flesch. in the 1970s, concluded that dyslexia does happen occasionally in the real world but it's very rare, like blindness or schizophrenia. You can’t use it as a get out of jail card….It's a serious abnormality and you would expect to find it intertwined with other problems. However, the official K-12 position is that children can have dyslexia but be above average in everything else! That's why you see these disingenuous articles about geniuses or VIPs who have dyslexia. Children are told that their condition is a gift. They can still be very successful in life. My conclusion is that this is another example of opportunistic PR regarding dyslexia. Similarly, in England children said to be dyslexic get an extra stipend from the government so many parents are eager to have their children diagnosed that way. Some children get extra time on tests. Think about that.
In effect, families make money if they will participate in the scam.