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I chatted with a woman whose 12-year-old son is superior in every way except one: he's not a good reader. That's what the boy's schools had declared; she fully accepted this vision. She didn't like it but she accepted it.

What's wrong with this picture?

A person superior in every way could suffer from color blindness, for example, or deafness. These problems have very localized causes. One gene is wrong; a nerve is wrong.

Reading's not like that. It's a very complex mental activity that draws on many regions of the brain. You have to remember words. You have to connect them to their meanings and contexts. You have to recall grammar and make associations.

When a person can't read, you would probably detect other problems, perhaps with speech, understanding, or expression. You would think, oh, I believe this person is impaired, not even thinking about reading in particular.

This was the picture for thousands of years. But now we have a new race of people, perhaps a million of them, who are distinguished by having just one lonely flaw that always seems for some unexplained reason to have something to do with reading. This counterintuitive affliction, as you probably know, is called dyslexia.

The Education Establishment, the International Reading Association, the International Dyslexia Association, and a segment of the scientific community claim to believe in this picture. A good case can be made that these groups are wrong. Perhaps they are disingenuous. Perhaps they suffer from moral dyslexia.

Please consider the following insights from some of our outstanding experts, people who have long honorable careers, each with 40 years in the trenches. These experts have taught thousands of children to read.

Mona McNee, author of "The Great Reading Disaster" and creator of the "Step by Step" reading program, summed up her experience this way:

"All children, apart from the blind, profoundly deaf and brain damaged, can learn to read within two years, while still in infant school. Reading schemes should not go on forever and after two years children should be capable of choosing their own books...[T]he undermining sense of failure and the various anti-social reactions that dyslexia provokes, have been manufactured by...wrong-headed teaching techniques."

Marva Collins, the famed educator from Chicago, says on her website:

"Children as young as 3-1/2 and 4 years of age are admitted to my school, at the beginning of every school year in September. I guarantee that they will all be reading by Christmas, three months later. That has been the results since I started my school in 1975....I developed my phonics program to unlock the mystery of reading. A daily recitation reinforces what is being taught and reviews what has already been learned."

Samuel Blumenfeld, author of "The New Illiterates" (1973) and arguably the country's foremost expert on reading, wrote: "Some children give up even before the fourth grade level. Those children become known as ´dyslexic´--a fancy medical term coined especially to describe the perfectly normal, intelligent youngster who can't learn how to read by the whole-word method."

I've just read Sigfried Englemann's excellent 1992 book, "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."

When you stop to consider that our Education Establishment has managed to create 50,000,000 functional illiterates, and 1,000,000 dyslexics, those four quotes should bring tears to your eyes.

Notice how decisive these experts are, and how sweeping their statements are. Virtually ALL children can learn to read, and quickly. Behold the genius of our Education Establishment, which casually estimates that dyslexia occurs in 25% of children or even more.

These so-called educators discuss dyslexia in a spacy way that seems to belong in an alternative universe. SHAZAM, some kids just turn out defective, there's nothing we can do, ALAS!....Having wrecked the child's progress, the Education Establishment labels the child dyslexic, ADD, learning disabled, cognitively impaired, etc., etc.

In 1955, Rudolf Flesch wrote his first bombshell "Why Johnny Can't Read," still an excellent reference. Flesch didn't speak of dyslexia so much as "remedial reading cases." He explained that they are caused by ignoring phonics. This book makes clear how completely the field of reading, by 1950, was overrun by quacks.

Flesch's sequel, "Why Johnny Still Can't Read," was published in 1981. (I can recommend it today, especially Chapter 12: "Your Child Is Disabled." Please, before you accept anyone's verdict that your child is flawed, read this chapter. Used copies can be obtained cheaply on Amazon.) In this book Flesch wrestled with the question, do dyslexics have an in-born trait or have they been messed up by the methods used in the schools?

Flesch concluded exactly what these other experts have concluded. If you use Whole Word (Dolch Words, Whole Language, etc.) you will activate dyslexia or you will create behavior which is indistinguishable from dyslexia. But these bad results happen only because you use a bad pedagogy. True dyslexia is very rare, comparable to blindness, insanity, etc.

I know that this is a contentious issue. Finally perhaps it comes down to whom you trust. I urge you to trust McNee, Collins, Blumenfeld, Engelmann, Flesch. These are smart people and these are good people. And I'm not sure you can say that about our Education Establishment.

I mainly want to urge everyone not to accept the dyslexia label until you are sure that misguided reading pedagogy is not a factor. (It's easy enough to test: does a reader leave out words, add words, substitute words, or reverse words? These odd behaviors are typically caused by Whole Word reading.)

Whole Word, Sight Words, Dolch Words and the rest of it are--for me--clearly bogus. There's no excuse for a school to use them.

As for that superior 12-year-old mentioned at the outset, I suspect his only flaw showed up only because his schools used Balanced Literacy.

(For more about this topic, please see "42: Reading Resources" on Improve-Education.org .)

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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.)