In 1955 Rudolf Flesch published a blockbuster called “Why Johnny Can’t Read.” In this still-relevant book Flesch lamented that: “The word method is gradually destroying democracy in this country; it returns to the upper middle class the privileges that public education was supposed to distribute evenly among the people.”
Toward the end of the book Flesch made an intriguing comment: “Mind you, I am not accusing the reading experts of wickedness or malice. I am not one of those people who call them un-American or left-wingers or Communist fellow-travelers. All I’m saying is that their theories are wrong.”
Point is, by 1955 some people were accusing our top educators of being “un-American or left-wingers or Communist fellow-travelers.”
Flesch prefers to put the blame on money. All of the leading Look-say (or Whole Word) authors had a Dick and Jane series and were making millions.
I recently asked Don Potter, phonics crusader, to explain why the Whole Word crowd had attacked phonics. He gave the same answer: "Follow the money."
I’ve asked another leading expert for his opinion on why the educators hated Flesch so deeply and pushed Whole Word so ruthlessly. His answer: "Our educators are jerks."
Jerks chasing money? Do you find that a satisfying explanation of motive?
Here’s what we know for sure. Starting around 1931 this country’s Education Establishment forced the Look-say method into nearly all public schools. Note: in the middle of financial collapse, millions of text books were wastefully tossed in the trash.
The new approach had not been tested in a systematic way. Trials should have been conducted in various cities and states. Instead, the educators acted in a sweeping, preemptive way. Businesses and academic fields rarely turn on a dime and charge off in the opposite direction; this happens in totalitarian societies. And that’s what happened with reading in America circa 1931.
Mark the year. The Russian revolution was a fact of history; and its progress was said to be glorious. Meanwhile, the US was falling into a deep depression. All the far-left elements were giddy with confidence that Moscow owned the future. In the 1930’s the Russians had many hundreds of front groups in the US, meddling in every aspect of American culture, certainly including education. (People forget how intense the Cold War was and how intense it would continue to be for decades. This was war for control of the planet. Communist ideology approved every dirty trick.)
The Education Establishment--with considerable see-no-evil cooperation by the major media and elite universities--pushed Look-say as relentlessly as Philip Morris pushed cigarettes. In both cases, there were increasing reports of undesirable side effects.
As early as the 1940s, major magazines ran articles about declining literacy. Look-say proponents mused in a mystified manner about why we could possibly have so many sub-literate children. What a puzzle! However, in 1955 Flesch’s bestseller explained how Whole Word was causing major damage to the country. Samuel Blumenfeld wrote “The New Illiterates” in 1973, making similar points. So the devastation was well-known, and well-explained. Meanwhile, children in parochial and private schools learned to read via phonics in the first few years of school. But guess what? Our Education Establishment did not relent! For my money, what we see here is an extraordinary display of "party discipline."
Another aspect that stays in my mind is that the Look-say experts concocted irrational explanations and cruel treatments. Life magazine, in 1944, claimed that reading problems might be caused by a range of physical ailments (glandular imbalance, heart disease, eye or ear trouble) or by psychological disturbances. The article described a little girl who was examined at Northwestern University’s reading clinic. Experts said she needed "thyroid treatments, removal of tonsils and adenoids, exercises to strengthen her eye muscles." The Life article concluded: “Other patients may need dental work, nose, throat or ear treatment, or a thorough airing out of troublesome home situations that throw a sensitive child off the track of normality....these range from alcoholic fathers to ambitious mothers who try to force their children too fast in school.” Irrelevant stuff. Sick stuff. Very sick.
So my judgment is that the people who kept this scam going were total fanatics. But I have a lot of trouble understanding how money could buy that kind of fanaticism, decade after decade. You have to think of people even more orthodox than priests or rabbis, ready to dumb down an entire country, create 50 million functional illiterates, and as well perhaps one million dyslexics. Play your mind over this story. I can see some crazy old Commies doing all these things--people like the Rosenbergs, willing to be executed in silence for the Kremlin.
In any event, the people pushing Whole Word cannot be considered ordinary people. They were a cult. Maybe money explains it for you. Maybe they were just little twerps with no idea how destructive they were. But the entire con is a lot easier to understand if you have 100 people at the top who took some sort of vow.
In short, my take is that these people were Stalinists, or they walked that way.
If anyone knows any relevant historical anecdotes, please leave them in your comments.
