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.”