Episode 9, August 25, Let's Fix Education Dyslexia...Parents Need To Know The Truth
Many books and probably hundreds of articles have been written about dyslexia.
Typically, these articles are long, fairly technical, and based on dubious science. The average parent has little chance of learning much from such articles. I'm going to take the opposite course. I'll be brief; I’ll present the message as lucidly as I can. And I’ll have a leading expert explain the science.
Dyslexia is a fancy word for difficulty with reading. And what would be the main cause of that difficulty? Bottom line, the Education Establishment insists on using methods that don't work. Therefore, the children don't learn to read because they are not taught to read. Naturally the schools want to hide this sick reality. So they need an all-purpose excuse for their failure. Here it is: Your kid was born messed up and that's the problem, so stop complaining.
Look carefully at this weird little fraud. The authorities don't teach children to read in the most efficient way, i.e., phonics. Predictably a great percentage of children end up sub-literate or semi-literate. Then the authorities say: Not our fault. This bad result is because your kids are damaged goods to start with. In other words, the dyslexia is your fault. .
Summing up, the Education Establishment has conducted more than 40 studies comparing phonics to sight-words. Phonics wins almost every time. This debate would be over today if our corrupt media would do an honest job.
Here is another grand summing up. Reading experts such as Rudolf Flesch concluded that genuine dyslexia is very rare, much like blindness or mental illness. The usual case is imitation-dyslexia, that is, dyslexia-like symptoms which are caused by bad instruction in our public schools, not by any deficiency in the child.
The simplest way for me to explain this strange hoax is to string together quotes from the illustrious Samuel Blumenfeld (1927-2015). I want everyone to know this name. He is one of our real educators and one of the few people you can trust completely.
Years ago he wrote a very long article called “Creating Dyslexia: It’s as Easy as Pie.” In other words, Blumenfeld wants to mock the alleged complexity that the Education Establishment likes to wallow in. No, Blumenfeld insists, this con is easy as A-B-C.
First, let's meet the famous Prof. Edward Dolch. He was, quoting Blumenfeld, “a professor of education in the early 1920s who composed a list of the most frequently used words in English. It was thought that if children learned several hundred of these words by sight, that is, by whole-word recognition, before they even knew the alphabet or the letter sounds, they would have a jumping ahead start in learning to read. But what Dolch did not realize is that once the children began automatically to look at English printed words as whole configurations, like Chinese characters, the child would develop a holistic reflex or habit that would then become a block against seeing our alphabetic words in their phonetic structure..
Next let's meet Professor Walter Dearborn of Harvard, who wrote in 1940, quoting again: ‘The principle which we have used to explain the acquisition of a sight vocabulary is, of course, the one suggested by Pavlov’s well known- experiments on the conditioned response. This is as it should be. The basic process involved in conditioning and in learning to read is the same.’ Note, in this writer’s opinion, that is absurd.
Blumenfeld continues: “But the development of a holistic reflex, as described by Professor Dearborn, creates an obstacle to the development of the phonetic reflex. It is this conflict, or collision, of reflexes that causes dyslexia. Undoubtedly, the professors of reading were well-aware that this conflict would develop, for they were acquainted with Pavlov’s experiments in artificially creating behavioral disorganization by creating a conflict of reflexes....we know from the experiments conducted by Pavlov and Luria in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and ‘30s that the psychologists had developed the means to artificially create behavioral disorganization. I submit that the symptoms of dyslexia developed in perfectly normal, physically healthy school children are the result of a collision of reflexes that occurs as the child advanced to the second and third grades....
“This is how it works. The child is given a sight vocabulary to memorize before he has acquired any phonetic knowledge of our writing system.... Here, and this is my opinion, we reach one of the most important things you can ever learn about the entire field of reading, Quote: “But when the child reaches the second and third grade where the number of words to be learned taxes the memory beyond its capacity, the child experiences a learning breakdown somewhat akin to a nervous breakdown. When the child is then taught some phonics, some letter sounds, ...as a means of assisting the sight process, the child experiences a conflict or collision of reflexes and develops dyslexia (‘disorganization of behavior’), the inability to see the phonetic structure of our words...
“By teaching this five-year-old child a sight vocabulary before he could master the letter sounds, he was being put on the road to dyslexia. This is particularly harmful because the child’s brain at that early age is still in the process of organizing its patterns of thinking, its cerebral habits, habits that are very difficult to unlearn later in life. ...
“Today, millions of American children are being taught to memorize sight words before they even know the alphabet, let alone the letter sounds....
“Thus, you can see how easy it is to cause dyslexia. Simply have your child memorize a sight vocabulary and develop a holistic reflex. ...That professors of education have perfected the process indicates that they know how it works and what its results in. That is why parents are never warned about teaching their children sight vocabularies. It’s a vital part of the dumbing down process that underlies curriculum development in our education system and is supported by professional associations, journals, publishers, federal programs and funding, and the establishment as a whole.”
End of quotes from Blumenfeld. I have to say, isn't that beautiful stuff?! And consider that the professors knew all of it in 1928 because Dr. Samuel Orton, a distinguished neurologist, released his extensive study of phonics versus whole word. Orton concluded two things: Sight-words don't work, and the kids forced to learn them will be damaged for life.
All of which explains why, in his last book "The Crimes of the Educators,” Blumenfeld stated our national predicament this way: “K-12 education is a criminal enterprise from top to bottom.”
Dyslexia organizations like to claim that dyslexics have different brain patterns, and that’s the big problem. Blumenfeld and phonics experts (such as Don Potter) claim that sight-words memorization creates those altered brain patterns, and that is the big problem.
Here we are reminded that our media are actually on the wrong side and don't bother telling parents what they need to know. It's a safe bet you have never seen anything in your paper explaining why dyslexia is best understood as a trick or psyops.
Reading and phonics should be thought of as more or less synonymous. That’s the way it was from the time of the Hebrews and Greeks forward. Starting around 1930, our education experts foisted Look-say on the country and we have had an illiteracy crisis ever since.
If you only share one podcast in your life, this is a good choice.
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Helpful links:
My short video called "Reading Is Easy" explains the reading wars in 4 minutes.
I often refer to Don Potter as “the phonics guru.”
An article about Dr. Samuel Orton’s decisive research ca. 1928 can be found here.
"Creating Dyslexia: It’s As Easy As Pie.”
“The Strange Truth About Dyslexia” offers key quotes from Siegfried Engelmann.
