1955 is a pivotal year in American history. This was the year Rudolf Flesch published “Why Johnny Can’t Read”, a book that explained the country’s illiteracy crisis.
The biggest crime in American history didn’t start that year; but Flesch exposed it and forced people to confront it. The crime actually began 20 years earlier...
Historically, most Americans could read; literacy rates went up until about 1935. That was when progressive educators discarded phonics and forced Look-say into the public schools. (This method made children memorize the shapes of words, while ignoring the letters and their sounds.)
Meanwhile, the country was suffering through the Great Depression from 1930 to 1940, World War II from 1940 to 1945, and then the slow recovery from both. People were busy and distracted, not paying much attention to education.
However, even by 1945, there was mounting evidence that something horrible was unfolding. The US military had to reject almost a million young men due to poor reading skills.
In 1950, Paul Witty, one of the foremost Look-say experts, mused: "Why are there so many poor readers in our schools?...Is it true that one-third of our high school students can't read at the fifth grade level? That's what one magazine writer estimated in 1946. Other articles have painted almost as bleak a picture."
Rudolf Flesch in 1955 explained the problem, noting, “I’m not accusing the reading “experts” of wickedness or malice...All I’m saying is that their theories are wrong and that the application of those theories has done untold harm to our younger generation.”
Flesch’s book became a bestseller, one of the most talked-about books of the century. So at this point everyone knew the problem; and they knew the answer.
The Education Establishment reacted in a surprising way. They savaged Flesch and formed the International Reading Association (IRA), a huge professional organization with one goal: to keep Look-say (later known as Whole Word) in the public schools. This is where a scandal story (“Experts back wrong theory”) became a crime story (“Syndicate falsifies evidence, lies to public...”).
When the Education Establishment introduced Look-say circa 1935, there was only a rickety scaffolding of theory to justify this drastic move. The experts had done no rigorous testing. But by 1955, most of the nation’s children had been used as guinea pigs, thereby producing a vast library of gloomy data. That’s why 1955 is a pivot point. The educators had to know, even without Flesch, they were destroying children and decreasing literacy; but they went right on.
Flesch was stunned by these developments. He naively assumed that once the problem was explained, everyone would work together to change course. The opposite happened. He was in a war.
In 1958 two pro-phonics researchers published “Reading, Chaos and Cure”, a book that gives us a vivid sense of the period following Flesch’s book, as scandal morphed into crime. The authors (Terman and Walcutt) present a lot of statistics and anecdotes contrasting school districts using phonics versus those using Whole Word. They report that when reading is properly taught, virtually every five-year-old easily learns to read. These two experts were optimistic that the tide was turning, and that everybody had to embrace the obvious solution, phonics.
Wrong again. The Education Establishment was actually able to discredit phonics and to keep Whole Word as the common way to teach reading from the late 1950s to 2000, despite declining literacy and a tsunami of weird mental and emotional problems such as dyslexia and ADHD.
Circa 2000 the Education Establishment retreated to the extent that they embraced a watered-down method called Balanced Literacy. But they were still forcing sight-words (also known as Dolch Words) into the first grade. So, from “Why Johnny Can’t Read” to now, that’s 55 years of unremitting stupidity and malfeasance.
If these people are ideological fanatics, everything makes perfect sense. Or If they are the most greedy little careerists ever. Or if they are the biggest fools in the universe. Unfortunately, none of these people has made a confession, so we don’t know for sure. My own guess is that the people at the very top had to be far-left ideologues. Nobody else could do to millions of children what these people did.
I tend to think that the bureaucrats in the middle and at lower levels were like guards in German prison camps: carrying out orders, trying to be good soldiers.
Whatever the motives, the damage that these people did is vast. The figure typically used is 50 million functional illiterates.
American public schools became a twilight zone where common sense was sent into exile, and millions of children had to endure years of suffering as they slowly accepted the idea that they would never read a book. (Everyone else seems to read easily—that’s what makes it so devastating for the victims.) They might work another 50 years as second-class citizens, deprived in an operational sense of 5 to 15 IQ points, working at jobs a level or two below what should have been.
Remember, Whole Word not only hides from you the right way to read, it gives you a lot of bad habits that permanently prevent you from understanding your affliction or figuring a way out of it. Poor readers assume they were born without, so to speak, the reading gene.
People who can’t read can rarely be successful in our society. So the reading conspiracy, with its attendant plague of illiteracy, is for me clearly the greatest crime in American history. So many millions of victims, over so many decades, the crime and its dolorous effects occurring anew each day, dragging down the entire society.
What is a bigger crime?
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(For more analysis of reading, see #42: Reading Resources - on Improve-Education.org.)
