Episode 142 Wed., March 20, 2024
Can Anyone Read?
I think that too often the answer is: no, not really. What we have now is a great range of readers, with only the best being what we used to call readers...
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(Short but comprehensive explanation of the reading wars. Very good. Please share.)
(Please, everyone, look at my short video Reading Is Easy. Only four minutes.
And order a copy of Why Johnny Can’t Read (used, less than $10 on Amazon) so you can read the first chapter, about 22 pages, and then you'll know the whole crazy history of keeping America illiterate.
Flesch’s big mistake was thinking everybody would grasp his short explanation of why sight-words don't work. He thought it was so obvious. One of the most intriguing miscalculations* in history.
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Bruce Deitrick Price
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Bio: Bruce Deitrick Price is a novelist, artist, poet, and education reformer.
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LET'S FIX EDUCATION by Bruce Deitrick Price
Episode 142 Wed., March 20, 2024
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>>>>> Can Anyone Read?l
I think that too often the answer is: no, not really. What we have now is a great range of readers, with only the best being what we used to call readers.
All the phonics experts say that they can teach children to read by Christmas of the first year. A child might be a slow or fast reader but the point is they can sound out the words, so they understand what's on the page.
Meanwhile, all the sight-word readers are guessing on many words, and can actually read only a portion of the words on the page. So they look desperately at context, search frantically for clues, look hopefully for some word they know for sure.
For most younger people, reading is a mess. It's incoherent and painful. It takes a lot of time. It's not what the word reading used to mean.
Another way of explaining this situation: A literacy administrator said he had various tests which he could administer to his incoming college class. It took an hour and cost $100. I said, why not take a paragraph out of the newspaper, hand it to the student and say read this. If the student can read the paragraph without missing a word, without stumbling, without guessing, that's a real reader.
But what we have now is millions of people who are struggling readers, and then we have an array of testing procedures that are designed to get the desired verdict: proficient reader.
Bottom line: I think we have lots of people who have been labeled proficient, grade level, and so on. But it's all a lie because the reading is slow and arduous. Not fun. Many children reach the point where they tell everyone, "I hate reading. I never look at a book.” Truth is, these kids cannot read.
We have phony instructional methods and then we have a layer of lies on top of that. I believe that for the last ninety years the goal was to produce illiteracy, lots of illiteracy. But if children were too blatantly illiterate, then everybody would say the schools are doing a lousy job. So, what our so-called educators do is boast about new methods, but in fact they are merely new frauds shrouded in new fog.
Guessing is at the heart of this chicanery. Guessing is not reading. If a child guesses more than occasionally, the child is not a reader. But guess what? Guessing has been the official first resort for the last 70 years when a child does not know a word immediately. Think about that. Tens of millions of children have been deliberately consigned to failure. All the expert advice came down to two bogus gimmicks, guess or skip ahead.
Another way to discuss this whole thing is to point out that once upon a time reading for pleasure was the main reason people read, when not at a job. Lots of people can no longer read for pleasure. This is the greatest clue. The canary in the coal mine. You know that shysters control the schools.
We're coming up on the 70th anniversary of Flesch’s famous book Why Johnny Can't Read, seven decades of deception. Just think of the effort it takes to keep children illiterate. You have to con them into memorizing the wrong things and using the wrong strategies.
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Please, everyone, look at my short video Reading Is Easy. Only four minutes.
And order a copy of Why Johnny Can’t Read (used, less than $10 on Amazon) so you can read the first chapter, about 22 pages, and then you'll know the whole crazy history of keeping America illiterate.
Flesch’s big mistake was thinking everybody would grasp his short explanation of why sight-words don't work. He thought it was so obvious. One of the most intriguing miscalculations* in history.
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I covered Ed School Follies in Episode 140, the great book by Rita Kramer. One of my favorite anecdotes occurs when a future teacher asked for advice. “The professor describes the whole word approach to reading, suggests sight will work better than sound, says, "tell them to spell it, not sound it out. Watch them, they will. Eventually they'll trust you and they'll learn to read.” Now you know why the Marxist saboteurs were so eager to build hundreds of ed schools. That's where they would plant the bad seeds.
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(*Flesch pointed out that Chinese is a symbol language, and is not learned the way a phonetic language is learned. Wouldn’t it be crazy, Flesch asked, to learn English and Chinese the same way?? Flesch assumed everyone would say YES. He was wrong.)
This was the genius of the Education Establishment, to conceal sophistry and jargon inside a dishonest sales pitch. Chinese and English are very different entities. English is a phonetic language. Chinese is not.
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