As part of my research on Flesch, I actually read or tried to read “Reading Without Nonsense” by Frank Smith. Not easy to understand. It’s almost druidical, sort of floating above the real world. He casually mentions children learning 50,000 sight-words. He casually mentions children memorizing new words as easily as they memorize new faces. Sounds good, until you try to imagine somebody memorizng thousands of faces. Or tens of thousands of faces.

Reading Smith made me really focus on how insanely difficult look-say (or whole word) is for children. Mainly, there’s a vast quantity of words in English–almost a million now. (A person has to know at least 20,000 words not to be illiterate, for all practical purposes.)

Second is a factor nobody talks about, certainly not Smith. English has lower case and upper case letters. The same word has many forms, for example: teachers, Teachers, TEACHERS. Plus, there are the italic and hand-written variations. Plus, there are the exotic typefaces we have so many of. Consider this word: dale. Having memorized that shape, would you even realize that DALE is the same word?

Smith and Company like to pretend that look-say simply means an American child is learning English words the same way Chinese children learn their ideograms. Wrong. Those ideograms come in only one form; and there’s not nearly as many of them; and most of those ideograms contain picture elements–i.e. the symbol for “man” will reappear inside many other symbols, so there’s visual clues all over the place. The English alphabet is lean and efficient when used phonetically. Used ideogrammatically, it’s hopeless. Too many similar shapes, too many variations.

In my article “A Tribute to Rudolph Flesch,” I conclude that look-say is a form of child abuse. If you have a photographic memory, maybe then it could work. Otherwise, how could it?

Please see #21 on Improve-Education.org.

Did you see John Stossel’s TV report “Stupid in America?’” Things are grim out there.

Did you know that Professor David Gelernter (at Yale) said we should just close the public schools–they are that bad?

Did you read my “A Tribute to Rudolph Flesch?” You’ll enjoy it. On the other hand, the closer you look at whole word, sight-reading and the rest, the more depressed you’ll be. Our so-called educators couldn’t possibly promote a reading pedagogy that actually harms children, could they? Yes, they could. They did.

I just set up a second site (a blog, technically) called Bruce Price’s EDUCATION REVOLUTION. The thesis is that we need reform and maybe the time is ripe. Why? Because more and more people know that American education is debased and that educators can’t be trusted to fix the problem because they created it.

It’s like Senator Moynihan almost said…Better to have the schools run by any 400 people out of the phone book than by educators. Much better.

I want EDUCATION REVOLUTION to be a HQ for the reform movement. You’ll find some good thoughts, good links and good books. (Especially suggest this site to your friends who aren’t sure what to think.)

PS There’s also a link to “A Tribute to Rudolph Flesch.”

Well, I spent several years hoping to find a benign explanation for why our educators are so incurably drawn to bad ideas–quintessentially, look-say or whole word.

I confess to you that I couldn’t. I couldn’t see that Frank Smith and Ken Goodman were anything but sophists. I looked back at the early days of Education (ca. 1890) and couldn’t see that John Dewey (photo) was anything but a super-high-IQ quack. I worry I’ve missed some big insight that justifies everything; maybe I have. But I decided to take my best shot at explaining what is basically a great American mystery story. Judge the results for yourself.

My article, titled “A Tribute to Rudolph Flesch” (#21 on Improve-Education.org), starts with a careful analysis of why look-say was never a valid way to teach the reading of English. In this counterintuitive approach, children have to memorize each English word as if it were a Chinese ideogram–that is, by shape or design. (Very much as we remember faces, houses, cars, or objects of any kind.) Sounding out letters is NOT allowed. The look-say process is slow, labor-intensive, inappropriate for a language that is essentially phonetic, and impractical for a language with a vast vocabulary (English is now approaching 1,000,000 words.)

Rudolph Flesch explained all this in his two bestsellers, “Why Johnny Can’t Read” (1955) and “Why Johnny STILL Can’t Read” (1980). These books were hugely popular. Did the educational establishment listen? Not at all. They vilified Flesch and went right on promoting look-say as much as possible. They still do. This sort of ideological rigidity is curious and needs to be understood. If Flesch is right, look-say has caused a vast amount of illiteracy and dyslexia, all of it unnecessary.

Explaining what happened and figuring out the motives–that’s the goal of “A Tribute to Rudolph Flesch.”