Well, I have to say I’ve had quite a run with reading, reading disabilities, and then trying to figure out how it was all connected, and how it all started. This country had 98% literacy a century ago, but then our educators went to work and took care of that!! Now we have 40,000,000 functional illiterates. Who are the geniuses in charge of this program? How can we thank them enough?As some of the earlier posts chronicle, I first became fascinated by Rudolph Flesch’s apparent common sense (use phonetics to teach a phonetic language) and the hysterical condemnation this poor guy aroused from the nabobs of non-education. Wow! What was this all about? Many months and a lot of research later, I was finally able to write “A Tribute to Rudolph Flesch.” In the process I ran smack into John Dewey, the Father of American Education, or as I recently nominated him, the Father of Dumbing Down.You can’t understand all the anti-intellectual tendencies in American education without confronting Dewey. This guy was willling to trade off academic content in order to have more passive, more dependent, more socialized children. Bingo, that’s where it started. Next stop, growing illiteracy and, because Dewey’s clones promoted a reading pedagogy that did not work, growing impairments such as dyslexia. I just finished a summary of all these weird developments: “Phooey on John Dewey.”Both articles are on my site Improve-Education.org.  The following video is titled: John Dewey and the Burden of Ideology.