Dyslexia – Bah Humbug

The great debate, raging throughout American society and the field of education, is whether dyslexia is actually a real thing. Shouldn't it be easy to tell? Yes, of course, if the Education Establishment were scientific as opposed to being ideological.

 Here's the whole thing condensed to a few words: children must learn to read with phonics. If you make them memorize sight-words (as happens throughout our public school system) they will have a lot of difficulty and collateral damage. 

 Having difficulty and damage--are you ready? – is what our public schools call dyslexia. They cause it and then they label it. Then they say to the parents, it's your fault because you had a defective child!!!

 If you raise children in a house with lead paint, you can expect mental difficulties. Sight-words inflict cognitive damages comparable to those inflicted by lead paint. Keep children from eating lead paint; and children will no longer have these problems.

 The link below goes to "Dyslexia is a Myth" on American Thinker. My original title was "Dyslexia--Bah Humbug." I liked this title, so I'm happy to use it here.

This article mainly presents Samuel Blumenfeld's excellent analysis of the dyslexia issue. Every parent with young children in the public schools should read this article. LINK
 

Phonics and reading are the same thing

The big swindle of the past century is when the Education Establishment pretended that phonics was old, obsolete, hard work, useless, no longer necessary, boring, and (clearly) children would be so much better off without it. This fraud started circa 1931 and continues today.

Those lies turn children away from being capable students to being hopeless lumps of failure. That’s the official formula followed by our public school system. The only exception would be schools that claim to teach systematic phonics and do teach systematic phonics. But such a school is rare. Most of them lie to the parents, they mix in other things, they play games.

I’m always trying to explain in simpler and simpler terms that anything that goes away from phonics is a waste of time and destructive. Phonics,  phonemic, and phonetics are basically the same Greek word, and they all mean basically the same thing: sounds. We would probably be better off if we forgot those three words and just say “sounds.”

So if one adult asks another, “How are you going to teach your  son to read,” the correct answer is, “Sounds.” “Oh, you are going to use sounds?” “Yes, all the research shows that sounds is the way to do it.”

So children learn that the letters stand for sounds. If you see an a, you know that it represents a sound something like ahh. That's the central concept and that’s all there is to it. Just 26 letters are able to represent the whole spoken language.

 But the Whole Word fraud said that children did not need letters or sounds, and that they could memorize the shapes of thousands or even tens of thousands of words. This is completely insane.

 English words were never designed to be memorized as visual objects. Many words resemble many other words. It’s a hopeless project for the average child. Some never reach 100 sight-words. Our Education Establishment must like failure because they enable so much of it.

For how to teach children to read, see: "Preemptive Reading" LINK 

Education’s New Gettysburg Address

    Four score and seven years ago our progressives brought forth in this country a new notion, conceived in socialism, and dedicated to the proposition that all students must be created equal.

        Now we are engaged in a great civil debate, testing rather that notion, or any notion so arbitrary and totalitarian, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that debate. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for the ideologues who here told lies that this infamous notion might live. It is altogether fitting and propitious that we should do this.

       But, in a larger sense, we can not deconstruct -- we can not debunk -- we can not satirize -- these extremists. The brave reformers, living and dead, who struggled here, have exposed them, far above our poor power to add or detract. It is for us the free, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- we here highly resolve that this country, under God, shall have a new birth of enlightenment -- and that education of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
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“Only the educated are free.” -- Epictetus

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed." -- Thomas Jefferson

“Education makes people...easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.” --  Henry Peter Brougham

“The goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of truth.” -- John F. Kennedy

Warning to parents: teach your children to read before school starts

Many public schools still teach sight-words. Take precautions.

School starts in a few months. Take steps now to make sure your kids understand the basics of reading. The basics are simple. You can teach them in a few minutes.

Problems occur if children are made to memorize sight-words without ever hearing about the basics. So here are the basics 1-2-3:

1) Children must learn to say, and then to print, the alphabet (the ABC's). They can identify any letter they see. 

2) Then they learn that the letters stand for certain sounds, A is for aaa. (Some experts say, skip the names of letters and just teach the sounds.)

3) Then children learn the blends; that’s when you say the T-sound (tuh-) and an A-sound quickly....and you get "taa."

That’s phonics!

That’s the basis of everything that goes on in a phonetic language. Most children will figure it out for themselves given enough time. The problem is that less-verbal kids need direct instruction the most.

If the child ends up at a school that still teaches sight-words (also known as high-frequency words, Dolch words, whole words and other names), that child can be slowed down drastically.

Here are some resources you can use. They all deal with the same problem from different directions. So pick one and start:

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"54: Preemptive Reading" 
provides quick intro to phonics concept.
LINK 

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Best video on reading.  
If too small, view on YouTube.