By Cambridge Who’s Who^® Member Bruce Deitrick Price

For several years I’ve been slogging through the trenches of the “Reading Wars.” The battle, even after a century, still rages: how should six-year-olds be taught to read? Confusing claims fly through the air.

Here’s a disturbing aspect for me: the vast majority of people don’t understand what’s going on and don’t seem to care. Illiteracy? Dyslexia? What’s that got to do with them? They can read. Additionally, the media almost never touch this topic. There’s a great silence, leaving educators free to perpetuate bad ideas.

I’m always trying to find better ways to explain the reading wars to the millions of parents with children in harm’s way. Here I’ve reduced everything to a half-dozen main points:

1) There are two competing theories: one is phonics. As explained by Rudolf Flesch in two bestsellers, “Why Johnny Can’t Read: And What You Can Do about It,”  and “Why Johnny Still Can’t Read: A New Look at the Scandal of Our Schools,” a phonetic language such as English has to be learned phonetically. Common sense, wouldn’t you say?

On the other side is Whole Word, also called look-say, sight-reading, Whole Language, and Balanced Literacy. (The shifting names tell you a lot: as each name gained a bad reputation, a new marketing campaign had to be launched.) Whole Word says that English words must be learned like Chinese ideograms — as shapes or graphic designs — the same way we learn faces, logos, art objects, houses, cars, airplanes, electrical symbols, etc. (all objects without any intrinsic phonetic clues).

2)  Whole Word demands that children neither learn nor use phonetic clues. (Here’s one example of what kids can’t know: a word starting with an “s” is pronounced starting with an esss-sound.) Whole Word bizarrely insists that such information be kept secret. This approach guarantees that when a child sees a new word starting with the same letter, the child will have no idea how to pronounce or understand the word, just as you are probably helpless in understanding 生年月日.

3) Whole Word says that English can be memorized one word a time. This is plainly silly because English now consists of almost a million words and names.  A college graduate probably knows more than 100,000 words.

Memorizing English one word at a time is excruciatingly tedious and difficult. Even the educators pushing Whole Word aim for only 100-300 words a year, at most. Focus on that number. They’re aiming for 1,000 words MAX by fourth grade, 2000 words MAX by eighth grade. Children reach age 12 and can’t even read a newspaper. These are the “A”-students and they are effectively illiterate!

4) Whole Word places impossible demands on the memory. Think of something you are good at remembering — antiques, phone numbers, houses, cars, faces, famous paintings. Could you remember even 1,000 of them, and instantly recall their correct name or meaning at reading speed? How about 5,000? If you know only 5,000 English words, you are just starting.

Whole Word basically requires that you have a photographic memory. People with good memories might struggle through to an awkward, exhausting sort of literacy; they can read, sort of, but they will not read quickly or for pleasure.

People with ordinary mental powers or below are the real victims. Some of these children reach fourth or fifth grade, and they can’t remember even 500 words. They are categorized as “learning disabled.” They will be considered retarded by friends and family. They will probably drop out of school.

5) In fact, Whole Word messes up the brain. When a child learns to see SHAPES, not sounds, on the printed page, that child is on the road to dyslexia. The printed symbol was designed to convey information about sounds. When such content is foolishly ruled out of bounds, the brain is left with very little to work with. English words come in many confusing variations: lowercase, UPPERCASE, exotic typefaces, and script. All the little prickly shapes look so much alike.

(Note that in today’s method, called Balanced Literacy, kids are still made to memorize sight-words in first grade; doing this reduces the brain’s ability to read phonetically.)

6) Whole Word, pushed by liberals and progressives, is actually most harmful to the disadvantaged, the minorities, the children whose parents don’t know enough to protect them. The teachers say, “Go home. We know what we’re doing.”

Marva Collins, a famous educator, comments: “Our children and parents surrender themselves to those who are identified as protectors, but who actually destroy them.”

Bottom line: if you believe in leveling or “dumbing” down, Whole Word is a useful technique. Conversely, if you believe children should be helped to achieve their full potential, Whole Word is arguably child abuse.

Personally, I’m satisfied that Whole Word is one of the greatest scams of the 20th century. That our educators could pull this off will be marveled at for generations.

For more of this analysis, see “42: Reading Resources,” on Bruce Price’s education site Improve-Education.org.

By Cambridge Who’s Who Contributing Author Bruce Deitrick Price

Here’s an odd thing to confess: I have been writing about education for 30 years. It has been an exciting adventure; it has also been at times totally mystifying.

We have grown to expect that there are faster, more pleasant ways to accomplish any task; conversely, there must be slower, ineffective ways of doing so. It is the second methodology that the education establishment seems to prefer. Our public schools appear almost intentionally designed to perform at a mediocre level. How can this tendency be explained?

When you look at the statistics and surveys, you will notice that they paint a consistently bleak picture. We spend billions every year on public education, yet SAT scores continue to fall. Our top students do not compete well with top students from other countries. The general public seems to know barely enough to read a daily newspaper. And then there is the really big mystery of 50 million functional illiterates. Who let this tragedy happen?

To answer these questions, I researched further back in history. I tried to understand how the early educators from a century ago looked at life, children and this new field they had created. The unexpected reality is that they were not primarily focused on education as most of us understand the term, but were preoccupied with social engineering. Education was a set of tools with which they intended to build a new, more leveled society.

Many of the articles I have written attempt to explain where and why our educators got off track. I have been especially fascinated by the Reading Wars, a significant conflict in American education and a clear illustration of what can happen when elite educators lose their way. Basically, phonics was scorned; a flawed method called whole word was enshrined and literacy promptly started to decline.

As I gained more understanding about the damage caused by bogus reading methods, I began to have a clearer sense of what we need to do across the board to improve our public education system. We simply have to identify the failed ideas and get rid of them.

Education reformers typically try three other approaches: spend money, recommend new policies or point out best practices. I do not think these techniques will work now. The problem is that the education establishment is married to its bad ideas; these people are set in their ways. We need an intervention.

Oddly enough, we are engaged in an education war with our own educators. I want to persuade the public that this is an intellectual war – we must fight the bad ideas with good ideas. I do not think we have any hope of improvement unless we confront what happened to American education: namely, that our schools were made ineffective by design.

So now we have to move in the opposite direction: discard the gimmicks that were smuggled into the system; then restore basics and academics to their proper prominence, albeit taught in the most ingenious ways. Our first job is to zero in on the dozens of overhyped “progressive” innovations that turned out, in practice, to be destructive and regressive. We will be better off without Whole Word, Reform Math, Constructivism, No Memorization, Self-Esteem, Bilingual Education, Cooperative Learning, Fuzzy Anything and a dozen others.

Many people like to believe that our educators are clumsy or befuddled by fads. No, I am afraid not. You would have a much clearer sense of what happened if you were to imagine a bunch of guys like John Dewey seated around a table discussing their ideological goals, devising tactics, and trying to keep the public from interfering. I know people who shy away from the word “conspiracy,” but let’s be realistic. This track record goes back nearly a century. Let’s show respect for those 50 million functional illiterates who spent their lives in a twilight zone, thanks to John Dewey and his pals. You cannot create this kind of disaster in a few years or by accident. No, the perpetrators have to keep plugging away, decade after decade. I think the evidence proves that our education establishment did just that.

It is painful to deal with such an unpleasant history, but it is also very liberating. Suddenly, everything makes sense. Dewey and his friends were socialists; they were trying to create a socialist America. This goal is clear in their writings. For them, the obvious first step was to reduce individualism and to raise more cooperative children. How do you do this? Dewey’s answer–and it is still in play–is that you drastically limit the time spent on reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, etc., while giving much more time to group activities. And when you do teach substance, you teach it in muddled, ineffective ways. There is the whole agenda in a nutshell. It is only a matter of time before everybody knows a lot less and thinks much less clearly.

I should mention, by the way, that I never criticize teachers. I am concerned only with top education theorists, administrators, etc. These people are responsible for what happens in American education. Teachers are as much the victims of these educators as the children and parents are.

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Bruce Price deals with all of these topics on his website Improve-Education.org and in his fifth book “THE EDUCATION ENIGMA – What Happened to American Education.”