If you are interested in the reading wars, please see a review I just put on Amazon.com for Frank Smith’s “Understanding Reading,” one of the most influential books of the last 50 years.

To this day, I never meet anyone who understands what the reading wars are all about. The Whole Word people keep the debate so murky and sophistical, you’re lucky if you escape with your sanity (or your wallet or your children).

In this Amazon review, I came up with a simple way to clarify Whole Word’s nuttiness.

Stop and think about how difficult it is to memorize numbers. Phone numbers, for example. How many could you retain if your life depended on it? Even 100?

Point is, recalling “Whole Numbers” shows you the difficulty of memorizing “Whole Words.” That’s what Whole Word does—it reduces learning to read to memorizing thousands of number-like designs. For the new reader, English looks like this: sjfgjp tsbfg hthwl xnsk hwhty. For all practical purposes, it also looks like this: 38685 352661 375707 26646 464 8278 664.

For the brain, this is very hard work. And guess what. The same bad thing happens in all cases: REVERSALS. 4581 or 4518? xnsk or xnks? All options look reasonable. Such reversals are quite normal when we struggle to recall a number. But when kids can’t get the letters straight it’s called dysfunction, it’s called dyslexia!

Seems to me, an entire bogus industry has been built on this non-problem. Geniuses invented the alphabet to make memorizing words easier. What kind of people would discard this great advance?

Also see “30: The War Against Reading” on Improve-Education.org.

Please, if you know a non-reader or you are connected to a literacy program, check out what I believe is a very important new article: 33: How To Help  A Non-Reader To Read,  on Improve-Education.org. The country is said to have 50,000,000 “functional illiterates.” Typically, these are people once trapped in Whole Word classrooms. They mange to memorize 1,000 or 2,000 “sight words.” But they can’t read phonetically, which is to say, they can’t really read. They can’t read a newspaper. Their academic and employment prospects are limited. In addition, they often suffer from a common side-effect of Whole Word—that is, dyslexia. Have you ever tried to rub your stomach and pat your head at the same time? Your brain is divided against itself. There’s confusion and anxiety. In the case of dyslexia, the brain has two strategies when it encounters a word: pull up its meaning from memory; OR sound it out.

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.