Saturday, 31 October 2009 07:12
Bruce Deitrick Price - improve-education.org
It's time to re-think "Dyslexia".
Here's the BIG question: Is Dyslexia "Natural"? That is, it's genetic. You're born with it and you must accept this fate. Or is Dyslexia artificial? Not genetic, not real, not something you're stuck with?
Because, in fact, it's actually caused by external factors. . .
What if most of the people who think they have a terrible problem called dyslexia . . . Don't actually have anything wrong with them?
The truth about dyslexia: Many experts think dyslexia is an artificial disability created by schools using flawed reading methods.
Don't forget: U.S. public schools have created 50 million functional illiterates. Clearly, these schools do not understand reading.
During many of the same decades, Marva Collins, one of America's REAL educators, was teaching all the students attending her school to read in the FIRST grade, using phonics. "ALL!" she says on MarvaCollins.com. Many of them were minority kids from poor homes. Some as young as 4 or 5. Makes you think, doesn't it?
Here is a wonderfully concise explanation of the truth about dyslexia . . .
Siegfried Engelmann, one of America's foremost experts on reading, is the author of many books, including "Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons" and "War Against the Schools' Academic Child Abuse," where he writes:
"One of the greatest myths perpetrated by the establishment is dyslexia . . . There is precisely nothing wrong with the 'dyslexic' kid except that the teaching failed . . . [U]nderstand that dyslexia is real in the sense that kids who do not learn to read are obviously confused about what reading is . . . But the assumption of the label dyslexia is that the kid is at fault - - not that the kid has been the victim of academic child abuse. We have worked with thousands of kids and never seen one who failed to learn to read when the teaching and management details are in place. We've worked with several hundred kids whose IQ was below 80 and every one was able to read by the end of first grade." Case Closed !
Simply put, memorizing sight-words blocks or confuses the brain's ability to process words phonetically. Schools say kids can go back and forth between memorizing "sight-words" and phonetically learning, perhaps they can - - but not gracefully or quickly. Reading becomes hard work. Many kids become bad readers.
It is the state of being a bad reader that schools call "dyslexia". They cause it, they label it, and then they say, "It's not our fault."
Advocates of phonics say their students learn to read in first grade. Advocates of Dolch Words, Sight Words, Whole Word, balanced Literacy and the rest say their students learn to read in many years . . . maybe . . .
If you are a victim of Sight Words, the best thing is to start over with phonics. Today! You can undo the damage.
Improve-Education.org has many excellent articles about reading . . . "42: Reading Resources" is a good place to start.
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Bruce Price - is the founder of Improve-Education.org, a lively intellectual site with articles on Latin, birds, Pavlov, phonics, sophistry, 1984, the assault on math, design, teaching science, why our educators do a bad job, and much more.
Bruce Price's fifth book is "THE EDUCATION ENIGMA--What Happened To American Education." (Available on Amazon.)
