Episode 147: The Great Betrayal: Top Experts Make Millions by Promoting Worst Methods (Wed, April 24, 2024)
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First published as “42: Who Ruined Reading” on Improve-Education.org. Site is now unavailable due to incompetence of hosting company. I’m working on recovery.
Our Education Establishment is also incompetent. We have 50 million functional illiterates. Please stop putting up with this. Take a little time to understand the Great Reading Heist. Read “the Meaning of the Lucy Calkins fiasco.”
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Non-phonics instruction leads to poor reading, anxiety, ADHD, reliance on Ritalin, etc. There is no good reason for teaching with sight-words, except that “experts” insist.
Phonics expert say children typically learn to read in first grade. Requiring children to learn sight-words is typically asking the impossible.
Few humans can memorize even 100 license plates. Why would anyone think that ordinary children can memorize thousands of sight-words?
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Bio: Bruce Deitrick Price is a novelist, artist, poet, and education reformer.
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LET'S FIX EDUCATION: OVERVIEW
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LET'S FIX EDUCATION by Bruce Deitrick Price
Episode 147 -- Wed., April 24, 2024
The Great Betrayal: Top Experts Make Millions by Promoting Worst Methods
For 75 years, our Education Establishment has pushed an unworkable reading pedagogy based on the myth that children can learn to read by memorizing thousands of English words as SHAPES. This method--usually called Whole Word, Sight Words, or Memory Method--produces widespread educational failure (specifically, fifty million functional illiterates and more than a million dyslexics).
Such an approach cannot possibly work, as this short article will show:
Most people can memorize a few hundred sight-ANYTHING (for example, flags, logos, currency symbols, cars, paintings, or words); however, 500 is already a huge undertaking. English words, because they appear in multiple forms (e.g., brighter, BRIGHTER) are especially difficult for the memory. Mastering 2,000 sight-words is a Herculean task requiring MANY years and a near-photographic memory. But English has 1,000,000 words; college-level literacy requires 100,000 words. Clearly, the whole scheme is prima facie impossible. Why take children down this dead-end road? Arguably. illiteracy was the goal. (Another reason might be that William S. Gray made millions of dollars by selling millions of Dick and Jane readers, a whole-word curriculum of negative value.)
Schools all over America continue to force five- and six-year olds to start their education by memorizing 200+ sight-words. Once the brain gets trained this way (the wrong way), it’s hard to learn to read properly. Next stop: “Sorry. Your child is dyslexic.”
This scandal was already huge by 1955 when Rudolf Flesch wrote “Why Johnny Can’t Read.” But the scandal doubled and quadrupled as elite educators kept pushing-pushing-pushing what they must have seen was impractical and harmful. Children can't read; they lose self-confidence; they become anxious and defiant. At this point, Ritalin is often prescribed.
Some people believe that only ruthless ideologues could engineer something so destructive. Others say, no, the top educators are just hopelessly incompetent. Either way, these people deserve our condemnation. But let’s focus on the essential point, which is to eliminate this lunacy from the schools.
Virtually nobody can learn to read using Sight Words. Conversely, virtually everyone is damaged by trying. Years are wasted. Kids lose self-esteem and fall behind in all subjects. Whole Word is wholly stupid.
Here is another way of grasping the essential flaw. Naming a word-design is NOT the same mental process as reading a word. The first process uses brute memory; the second process uses clues and reminders contained inside the printed word. All of this is easy to demonstrate: assemble 100 photographs of famous people and a printed list of their names. Everyone can read the 100 names faster than they can recall the names. Memory is fickle. Invariably there will be lapses when you say, “Oh, I’ve seen all his movies. I just can’t think of his name... ”
To rescue reading, we have to face this unpleasant fact. The Education Establishment perversely favors a method that, ACCORDING TO ITS OWN CLAIMS, progresses very slowly and takes 5-10 years, if then. On the other side, phonics advocates state that most of their students learn to read in first grade. What kind of people would recommend the agonizingly slow method?
Our Education Establishment has been able to keep this cruel scam in play by constantly changing its name, and by wrapping the essential defects in lies and alibis. Please, imagine yourself in first grade trying to memorize the English language ONE WORD AT A TIME, a few hundred this year, a few hundred next year, a few hundred more in third grade, a few hundred more in fourth grade....well, you’ll probably imagine yourself screaming, “No blankety-blank way!!”
Please, let’s win the Reading Wars. Let’s get rid of every Sight Word, every Whole Word, every Word Wall, every Dolch Word. Then we can go on to win the Education Wars.
Finally, reading taught badly is an expensive folly. You've got all the remedial years, the endless assessment, tutoring, and psychiatric counseling, drugs to keep the children quiet. Phonics is the biggest bargain in town.
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First published as “42: Who Ruined Reading” on Improve-Education.org. Site is now down due to incompetence of hosting company. I’m working on recovery.
Our Education Establishment is also incompetent. We have 50 million functional illiterates. Please stop putting up with this. Take a little time to understand the Great Reading Heist. Read “the Meaning of the Lucy Calkins fiasco.”