Episode 184: Why American Public Schools Can’t Teach Children To Read? The Secret Story

Episode 184:  Why American Public Schools Can’t Teach Children To Read? The Secret Story  (Wed, Jan 8, 2025)

It was a deal signed in blood, or if not in blood, then in IQ points. Keeping  Sight-Words in play was a dirty trick on all the average students who were reduced a notch or three.

Frank Smith produced the sophistry required to keep nonsense in play.

There is a double penalty because learning to read with phonics actually raises intelligence, according to many researchers.

--------------------

video: READING IS EASY 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JV0tPGn-Ws

---------------------------------------------------------------
Listen to PODCAST or read TRANSCRIPT.
-----------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------

For a 2-page explanation
of how everyone can help,
visit  Education Reform 

When you need a smart gift,
give Saving K-12 .

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Word-Wise Education
757-455-5020
Bruce Deitrick Price

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bio: Bruce Deitrick Price is a novelist, artist, poet,
and education reformer.

>>>Don't hesitate to read episodes at random.
Everything on this podcast is up to date
because educrats cleverly stifle improvement.
That's the tragedy we need to fix.

Subscribe / Support the show

Let's Fix Education explains to Americans why their schools are so bad. The people in charge prefer mediocrity because they are socialists of one kind or another. If people work together to promote real education, we'll have it.

Transcript

LET'S FIX EDUCATION     by     Bruce Deitrick Price

Episode 184    Wed, Jan 8, 2025 

Why American Public Schools Can’t Teach Children To Read? The Secret Story

Reading scores have been dropping for 75 years. The country now has 50 million functional illiterates. Obviously, this country doesn't have a knack for teaching children to read.

More exactly, the professors of education prefer to promote a bogus method that simply doesn't work. (Like any good criminal, this pretender has many aliases but is best known as sight-words.)

This negative verdict is inescapable as a well-known neurologist had secured a Guggenheim grant to conduct a field study circa 1927. The big surprise was that Dr. Samuel Orton was shocked by his own findings. He concluded that not only did this method not work, using it can cause long-term cognitive damage, i.e., functional illiteracy.

Now you can imagine this was the occasion for embarrassment and finger-pointing. How could professors of education go on promoting a known failure?

They needed a man like professor Frank Smith (1928-2020) who could give their clunker a new glamour. They needed a master of sophistry, a genius really, equal to the legendary Bernie Madoff, the greatest Ponzi artist in American history.

It was Frank Smith’s special destiny to create the intellectual scaffolding for keeping a boondoggle in play for another 50 years.

All the defenses, the arguments, the rebuttals, all the extremely high-level BS you encounter in the field of literacy was mostly crafted by none other than Frank Smith.

I invite you – no, I urge you – to peruse the thirteen quotes that are the most reckless abuses of logic and experience.

Frank Smith, starting in the 1960s all the way to the next century, provided the intellectual artillery, the seeming coherence, that could sustain the false teaching method known as Whole Word or Whole language.

His specialty was the preposterous paradox, the obvious absurdity, the golden sophistry that rendered thought impossible.

These historic quotes are from Frank Smith’s most famous book Reading Without Nonsense (1978), a book that is nothing but nonsense.

For me, all of these loopy tidbits are like saying up is down, yellow is blue, and the way to fly is to jump realll high.

THE ALPHABET IS IRRELEVANT

“Readers do not need the alphabet.”

“[I]t is not possible to decode written language into speech. Phonics...just does not work.”

“This is the fallacy underlying phonics--the belief that there could be a set of rules that work efficiently to decode written language into sound.”

 “[C]hildren cannot even begin to learn to recognize a until they can compare it with every letter that is not a.”

 “In other words, when we read a word, we do not read letters at all.”

“I have said that children should not be taught the alphabet...[U]ntil children have a good idea of what reading is about, learning the names of letters is largely a nonsense activity.”

“The importance of being able to distinguish b  from dis grossly overrated.”

FINDING MEANING IN TEXT IS WHAT MATTERS

 “[I]t must be shown that readers can recognize words and comprehend text without decoding to sound at all.” 

“How is it possible to recognize written words without sounding them out? The answer is that we recognize words in the same way that we recognize all the other familiar objects in our visual world--trees and animals, cars and houses, cutlery, crockery, furniture and faces:--’on sight’.”

 “[R]eaders must bring meaning to print rather than expect to receive meaning from it....[W]here does meaning come from? The only possible answer is that readers or listeners must provide meaning themselves.”

SIGHT-WORDS ARE EASY

“There is no evidence that there is any limit to the capacity of human memory...”

“Most readers can recognize on sight and understand anywhere from fifty to a hundred thousand words.”

———————

In fact, the great mystery here is how did Frank Smith get away with his shtick? He performed his magic in front of the whole country. But too few stepped forward to dispute his gospel. Media were essentially silent. Parents were dazed and confused.

For a short version of the opposing side (only 4 minutes), see my video Reading Is Easy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JV0tPGn-Ws

--------------------------------------------------------------