“Little is gained by teaching the child his sounds and letters as a first step to reading. “English is essentially an unphonetic language….The skillful teacher will be reluctant to use any phonetic method with all children.” - Dr. “Current practice in the teaching of reading does not require knowledge of letters.” - Dr. “It is detrimental indeed to have the children spell or sound out their words at this stage.” - Professor Guy L. Yet here are some of the stupid things some of them have said about teaching reading: What they are doing is too depraved to be true. They’re educators, right? They couldn’t be so depraved that they’d try to make people illiterate.Īnd that is how they continue to get away with their criminal conspiracy against the people of America. So, at this point, the average person thinks, well, okay, maybe it doesn’t work, but that was probably just an accident. The primary tactic in this war was the use of a reading pedagogy that does not work…. Of all the things that educators did during the 20th century, none was more central and more destructive than the war against literacy. He was focused on reading, but our social engineers were wreaking havoc across a vast front…. I suspect Flesch had no idea of the forces arrayed against him. Time magazine of Janusummed up the reaction of the establishment: “American education closed ranks against Flesch, and when educators were not denouncing the ‘Devil in the Flesch,’ they were damning the ‘Flesch peddlers.'”īruce Dietrick Price wrote in his brilliant 2011 tribute to Rudolf Flesch on his website: They were the cleverest, most intelligent subversives in all of American history, and they were getting away with it. Flesch had made them seem stupid and mistaken when they were anything but. Naturally, when Why Johnny Can’t Read came out in 1955, the professors of education were furious. A dying laissez-faire must be completely destroyed, and all of us, including the owners, must be subjected to a large degree of social control.” Harold Rugg wrote in 1933: “Through the schools of the world we shall disseminate a new conception of government - one that will embrace all the activities of men, one that will postulate the need of scientific control … in the interests of all people.”Īnd in 1934, Willard Givens, head of the National Education Association, wrote: “… Many drastic changes must be made. Historic capitalism, with its deification of the principle of selfishness, its reliance upon the forces of competition, its place of property above human rights, and its exaltation of the profit motive, will either have to be displaced altogether, or so radically changed in form and spirit that its identity will be completely lost.Įventually, Counts gave up on socialism when he realized that such a system would lead to a cruel Stalinist dictatorship. Professor George Counts of Columbia wrote in 1932: Indeed, by the 1930s, some educators were quite overt in their espousal of socialism. But what Flesch didn’t know was that these professors of education were not stupid and that the new method of teaching reading was part of a larger conspiracy to dumb down Americans so that they could be led to give up their individualistic freedoms and adopt a socialist form of government. It quickly became known as the look-and-guess method.įlesch proved by citing a number of studies that phonics worked better than look-say in teaching reading, and he thought that the educators would realize that they had made a terrible mistake and would return to the teaching of phonics. And Flesch explained why: They were based on a look-say method of teaching reading, a method which required children to learn to read English as if it were like Chinese, an ideographic system rather than a phonetic one.įlesch wrote: “The teaching of reading - all over the United States, in all the schools, in all the textbooks - is totally wrong and flies in the face of all logic and common sense.” He then went on to explain how the professors of education changed the way reading is taught in our primary schools by getting rid of phonics, the proper way to teach a phonetic writing system, and introducing a new sight method that teaches students to read English by memorizing each word by its shape and context. Somehow, those colorful little Dick and Jane books with the lovable dog Spot weren’t doing the job. Most Americans have heard the phrase “why Johnny can’t read” but don’t associate it with the title of a book that became a bestseller because it revealed for the first time to American parents why their little Johnnies were having such a tough time learning to read in their schools. Rudolf Flesch, author of that famous book, Why Johnny Can’t Read and What You Can Do About it, published in 1955. Most Americans under fifty, including teachers, have never heard of Dr.
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