Public schools are pushing Dolch Words at kids as young as 4 and 5. Once the child learns the strategy of treating words as graphic objects to be memorized by their shapes, that child is basically finished as a fluent reader. Sure, the smarter kids will find their way back to phonics in time; they will see the sounds inside the Sight Words. But the slower, less verbal kids are not that flexible. They try to do what they are told—guess, use context, memorize shapes, don’t sound out. Their reward is a reading disability.The whole thing seems like a sick joke….until you glance back at that number 50,0000,000. Our educators have been busy, haven’t they? This new article provides quick diagnostics for assessing the damage. The idea is that a good reader will guide a poor reader through the article, and together they will begin a journey of discovery and recovery.  33: How To Help A Non-Reader To Read.

 In thinking over this piece, I realized that there was a third front to the war, which was almost as important as the other two. Namely, the war against memorization and facts. Educators for 100 years have criticized requiring students to know—i.e. actually be able to recall—anything! I tell you, if you are idealistic and assume other people are, you are going to be in for a shock as you peer into this swamp. Left to their theories and tendencies, our educators would guarantee that students could hardly read; could do simple arithmetic only with a calculator; and be utterly ignorant of even the most basic information. Which is why there’s a TV program called Are You As Smart As A Fifth Grader? Imagine that being asked 50 years ago! Late News: And there is Jay Leo and Jaywalking. I believe Leno is doing more than anyone else to make the country aware of our educational decline. Accordingly, my site Improve-Education.org named him Educator of the Year for 2008. If you are not familiar with Jaywalking, you can check this short video: Educator of the Year—Jay Leno    

 ”To say that “Whole Word” language learning causes dyslexia is completely absurd! Dyslexia is a brain function style - is not actually a disorder since it also comes with a whole host of positives and giftings. Not to mention the fact that most dyslexics learn to read much more effectively with “whole word” than with phonics as they are global “whole concept” learners. Phonics with it’s disjointed teaching of sounds only increases their confusion.” 

 But what if Whole Word can’t teach anyone to read?? What if Whole Word causes the dyslexia and will make it worse?? The following is my response to the reader’s comment….

“Rudolph Flesch and Samuel Blumenfeld, both extraordinary minds, concluded that dyslexia, in the vast majority of cases, is an artificially induced disability. Totally, tragically unnecessary. Caused by the unworkable reading pedagogy called Whole Word. All of this is bad enough. But our educators, in a desperate bid to buttress Whole Word, have allowed a second twilight zone, a second mythology, to grow up around dyslexia. All the way back in 1928 Dr. Samuel Orton, one of the first to investigate the harm caused by Whole Word, anticipated what we are still dealing with today: “…faulty teaching methods may not only prevent the acquisition of academic education by children of average capacity but may also give rise to far reaching damage to their emotional life.” It’s sad to see a positive spin attached to such damage. A lot of my work is aimed at helping people to grapple with the dark side of Whole Word. Once people see that it cannot possibly work and should never have been used, then they can migrate toward seeing that dyslexia is, for the most part, the affliction that should not be. Flesch concluded that a cure is possible. The victim must learn to read from scratch, and learn to read phonetically, as a two-finger typist -must start over to learn proper typing.”

———-I made a great little video for YouTube that looks at some of these issues; the title is Phonics vs. Whole Word. 
Authored by Bruce Price. Hosted by Edublogs.]]> http://brucedeitrickprice.edublogs.org/2007/12/18/dyslexia-whole-words-second-shadow/feed/ http://brucedeitrickprice.edublogs.org/2007/12/07/educational-videos-on-youtubecom/ http://brucedeitrickprice.edublogs.org/2007/12/07/educational-videos-on-youtubecom/#comments Fri, 07 Dec 2007 21:42:27 +0000 Bruce Price http://brucedeitrickprice.edublogs.org/2007/12/07/educational-videos-on-youtubecom/ New software lets me create some very useful videos (actually they’re more like highly animated slideshows). Here are the titles you can find on YouTube:

Phonics vs. Whole Word

World’s Easiest Test

Once you find one, you’ve found them all! Many of the themes discussed in my posts on this blog are dealt with in these videos. The longest is less than 6 minutes.

Here’s the answer that is haunting me. Whole Word could be pushed upon the country, and phonics driven out of the schools, because our media and academics stood silently by and let it happen.

Remember, Flesch wrote his first Johnny-can’t-read book all the way back in 1955. Everything you need to know is in the first chapter. But educators mobilized against him. Who came to his defense? The media, who should be reporting the truth and the news? NO, not that I can discover. Academics, who should be protecting standards and literacy? NO, not that I can discover. A shameful silence spread across the land.

Please, if you know of examples where media or academics did rally to Flesch’s side, I’d like to know. Any year, any publication, any college. Leave a comment.

Here’s a summary of my school years: all my schools were highly-rated, but not one class was taught as well as it could have been. Why?! I’ve been totally intrigued by this question for a long time.

Here’s my suggestion: we need to look at classrooms the way an engineer looks at problems. How, in short, do we teach the most info in the fastest time with the least effort? That’s the ergonomic question.

I’ve finally condensed all my notes into an article titled “How to Teach History, Etc.” (#26 on Improve-Education.org). Here’s the main points:

1. School and teacher must commit to subject.
2. Use every teaching aid, every trick or technique that will make classes more memorable and effective.
3. Repeat, repeat, repeat. And then say it again some other way.
4. Every course is ideally a gigantic mnemonic device, a cluster of interconnected facts, a mind molecule, a matrix.

If you search “ergonomic teaching” or “ergonomic education” in Google, virtually everything you find will deal with the physical world–chairs, lighting and computer screens. That’s physical ergonomics….The educational establishment has been ruinously sidetracked by a second kind–social engineering…. My own fascination is with the third kind: intellectual engineering. The Greeks and Romans were equally fascinated. You’d think all my ideas would be old hat. In fact, it seems that nobody is bothering with this vital frontier. Well, surely somebody must be! But until I know for sure I’m dubbing myself the Father of Ergonomic Education, and inviting all of you to join me in a crusade to make our schools more efficient.

“I want to compliment Norman Augustine ‘57 *59 for his article on American education and productivity. I agree with all his points. So, why are we having these problems?

This article echoes many of the points made in the famous 1983 report titled “A Nation at Risk.” No progress in almost 25 years? Can that be by accident?

Antonio Gramsci, a Communist theoretician, said that if you wish to help poor children, make sure they got a good basic education. Unfortunately, our ed establishment became enamoured with an ideology that emphasizes social engineering over learning and literacy.

There’s a hundred policies and promises I could point to. But the emblematic program for the 20th century will always, I believe, be Whole Word (sight reading). Said to be the best way to teach reading, it is in fact unworkable. Let’s do the numbers. The goal ls that children will memorize 800 words each year, which evidently guarantees semi-literacy through high school. Futhermore, only people with exceptional memories can memorize 10,000 of anything–faces, phone numbers, antiques, houses, or sight-words. But you really need to memorize 25,000 or even 50,000 sight-words to be literate in English (which has a huge vocabulary).

The more you study Whole Word, the more you’ll probably conclude with me it was never anything but a sophistry. I find it especially troubling that the media and academia appear to have stood aside and let educators have their way.

I say it’s time for an Education Revolution (I have a blog by that name). The first step might be to politely suggest that our top educators are not likely to fix problems they have created.

We need lots of new ideas and new blood–people from the arts, business, the military, and the professions. Put Norman Augustine and Bill Gates in charge of the schools. Ah, there would be a fine start.”

Bruce Deitrick Price
Norfolk, Va.
Improve-Education.org

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NOTE: Bruce Price’s EDUCATON REVOLUTION (just Google those 4 words) is on Squidoo.com

There is in fact no necessary link between the politics of our education establishment and anyone’s progressive values. Antonio Gramsci, a real Communist, advocated giving poor children lots of basic academic skills, so they can escape poverty. What, pray tell, is “progressive” about schools that allow children to graduate without being able to read or write properly? No, the only sure link is the one between the media’s support of intellectually flabby educators and the continuing decline of the media themselves. Why don’t they see it: the schools are killing off their customer base!

Experts say this country has more than 40,000,000 functional illiterates. People are ignorant about even the most basic stuff. Where’s New York? Which way is the Pacific Ocean? What is France?…How can people who don’t have any background information enjoy reading a newspaper?

If our newspapers had better judgment, they would demand more achievement in the public schools.”
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This link between the ed establishment and our media is much on my mind. As I’ve studied the reading wars and concluded that Whole Word was always a dubious proposition, the thing that haunts me is that the media and academia stood silently by. Hardly a peep out of the best people and brightest minds. Please, if anyone knows of a professor at Harvard, Princeton, etc., who jumped into the fight along side Rudolph Flesch, I’d love to hear the name.

a letter sent to the Princeton Alumni Weekly:

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In “The Road Back to School” (Oct. 11, ’06), Caroline Horowitz ‘04 is quoted as saying that teaching has lost much of its prestige. Sad if true; but I don’t think it is. People still respect teachers.

What the public is figuring out is that educators can’t be trusted. (By educators, I mean the people with PhD’s who control the educational establishment.) The perception is that these people always want bigger budgets to pay for ideas that invariably turn out to be counterproductive. Whole-word and New Math are two familiar examples.

For an essay titled “A Tribute to Rudolph Flesch” (easily found in Google), I studied education back to the 1880’s. It’s a shocking story and a sad one: educators conspiring against education. John Dewey and his colleagues decided that, if they were going to turn America toward collectivism, they needed to dumb down the citizenry. This foolish scheme is still hurting us a century later.

My sense of it is that our educators are much too invested in social engineering. Unless they reform, they’ll become one of the least trusted groups in the country, and they’ll drag teachers down with them.
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signed: Bruce Deitrick Price