I just reviewed an old book for Amazon.com called “The New Illiterates” by Samuel Blumenfeld. Published in 1973, this book is still amazingly fresh. How can that be? Because our elite educators still hang on to all their excuses and sophistries, still refuse to work for genuine academic improvement.

In this book Blumenfeld points out that the locus of our problem is “the teachers of teachers,” the ideologues, that is, who run the ed schools. What has changed in 35 years?? 

More and more I suspect that progress will come from radicalized teachers. To promote this idea, I’ve just added “31: Teacher Liberation Front” to Improve-Education.org. The starting point for this article is a quote in a new book titled “The Great Reading Disaster” by Mona McNee and Alice Coleman. Writing about the UK experience, they state:

“The real villains were not the victimized teachers who carried out the intellectual child abuse but the training establishments that brainwashed them into doing so.” 

 I urge teachers to savor every word in that quote…Victimized…Brainwashed…”Training establishments” are, of course, the ed schools in England.  

As you’ll see in the next post, my site Improve-Education.org says that Jay Leno is Educator of the Year, that Leno is doing more than anyone else to showcase the failures of our public schools. Isn’t it significant that our educators have managed to make Jay Leno, a stand-up comic, appear to be a major intellectual force? (See video in next post for more analysis.) 
Should I apologize for being so tough on educators (i.e., the managers at the top)? I feel they’ve earned it. I’ve been studying this field for many years, and let me tell you, it’s like walking through some bizarre lab. The goal seems to be to create unintelligent life forms. Start with Whole Word, so that most kids cannot become fluent readers. Move on to Fuzzy Math, so they can’t count. Filter out all facts from the real world, the scientific world, the historical world, the scholarly world, the industrial world…
Really, I’d like to suggest that, for teachers, the most radical thing you can do is TEACH MORE. That’s the theme of Teacher Liberation Front. Join today.  

I’ve just finished a long historical piece called “The War Against Reading” (#30 on Improve-Education.org.) The main focus is on Whole Word and why it can’t possibly work. If you are confused about any of this, please check it out.  The article mentions a second, complementary war against arithmetic. This war was waged under the banner of New Math, then New New Math, which is a derisive term for Everyday Math, TERC, etc. Some of the same rhetoric is used in both wars: fuzziness is fine; guesses are good; students should bring their own meanings to the page; and precision is no big deal.

 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    

One of the big unreported stories in this country is that a whole industry has grown up around dyslexia—to excuse it, blame it on any cause but the real one, and find reasons why it’s not really so bad. Dip into any of this and your head will spin. The following comment (left by a reader in response to one of my articles) contains every premise and platitude now popular in that industry….

 ”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.