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 

Bruce Price, Criminologist

I usually call myself an education crusader, education activist, or education reformer. The basic idea is the same: things aren’t ideal and I want to improve them.

But these terms are misleading. They do not tell what I actually do all day, which turns out to be much more like what police investigators do. Or what, I like to think, Sherlock Holmes is doing right now in his stories.

There’s a crime. The police, detectives, investigators, and forensics people arrive at the crime scene and try to reconstruct what happened and who is guilty. That’s what I’m doing all day.

Truly, American public schools are the biggest crime scene in the history of the country and probably the world. All day, weird counterintuitive things are going on. Things that give the opposite results from what is claimed. Victims, suffering and dying, are scattered everywhere.

All the while, the Education Establishment lays down a barrage of false clues and tainted evidence. Every bad idea is praised as an upstanding citizen. Every bad result is concealed by jargon and disingenuous alibis. The Education Establishment blames parents, TV, drugs, sex, the kids, the Internet, sports, popular culture--in short, everything but themselves.

The criminals in the story are presented as heroes. The crimes are treated as victories or, at worse, momentary setbacks, innocent mistakes, and in any case the work of somebody else. 

So if we want to solve a crime we have to ignore all the BS. Be cop-cool and lab-clinical. First, start with a description of the crime. For example: we have 50 million functional  illiterates. Now, that’s a crime. How could it happen? The game is on, as Sherlock would say.

Our public schools created this result by using a lethal, unworkable method called Whole Word. Rudolf Flesch solved the crime in 1955. But the Education Establishment went right on. It’s like watching a criminal at a trial, continuing to lie. Whole Word was what cops call an MO or method of operation. Still going on in schools today. You say, how could they get away with it? Well, how could  O. J. Simpson kill two people and walk?

I think it’s what we call a corrupted jury. The Education Establishment is a billion-dollar syndicate, and protects the members of the gang and pays them well.

And what would be the motive, which is the main thing to deduce in criminal behavior. All of our educators are progressives, collectivists, socialists of some kind, and this has been true since the time of John Dewey 100 years ago. Their big goal is social engineering, creating a Brave New World, making a new kind of kid. Once you start thinking like that, you really don’t care if  children know  where Japan is on a map or what 6 x 7 is. And that’s the collateral damage we get.

 I remember when I found Sherlock Holmes and how much I enjoyed all the stories. I’ve enjoyed trying to solve educational crimes just as much. For an interim report from police lab, see “Top 10 Biggest Crimes in Education.” (aka Top 10 Worst Ideas) www.improve-education.org/id83.html 

To save the country, first save the schools

Here's a theme I've been talking about for a few years. The country's intellectual and financial decline is partly due to the mediocrity of the public schools. This decline can be reversed by adopting proven theories and methods. That's a doable project:  

Free The Schools --  a simple four-step plan  

 Our Education Establishment has an 80-year record of praising and protecting bad pedagogies. Enough.

Here is what we need instead, starting now:

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1. REAL READING. That means systematic phonics for several months until children learn to read. That means no Whole Word, no sight-words, no Dolch words, no high-frequency words. These gimmicks are all the same thing and the reason we have 50 million functional illiterates.

2. REAL ARITHMETIC. Schools use sensible, coherent programs such as Saxon Math, Singapore Math, or the like. (They do not use Reform Math in any of its forms-- Everyday Math, Connected Math, TERC.) Children master basic skills, know the multiplication tables, and can find answers. No more spiraling, fuzziness, or dependence on calculators. 

3. REAL LEARNING. It’s knowledge-based and fact-filled. Children learn basic information in the fields of Geography, History, Science, Literature, etc. Students advance in a logical way from the simple to the complex--which leads to genuine critical thinking. 

4. REAL EDUCATION. It’s academically correct (as opposed to politically correct). The emphasis is on building study skills and scholarly character. Students know a great deal, and know how to learn more. They can do independent work. They understand that precision, rigor, and honesty are the same things.

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FREE THE SCHOOLS 

is simply what all good schools have done throughout history and are now doing around the world.  

Good education is not rocket science. 

Get the asinine theories and methods out of the way. Real education will thrive.

We especially need this in the early grades, 

where lots of children have to play catch-up.

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If you can use or advance this campaign, please do so. If there are people or groups we should contact, 

leave info at: Word-Wise, 757-455-5020.

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A short article on what NOT to do: 

56: Top 10 Worst Ideas in Education.

A short article on what schools SCHOULD do: 

“A Bill of Rights for Students 2013”

[both on Improve-Education.org]

YouTube video version of FREE THE SCHOOLS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaT2S4Vep-w

The last straw: my paper in Norfolk just ran an article praising local schools for adopting all the recycled bad ideas from New Math, Reform Math, Constructivism, Cooperative Learning and all the rest. There is nothing new, not one good idea. But this newspaper is all aglow. 

How can parents defend themselves against this nonsense if the media always aid and abet the Education Establishment? The short answer is that parents should not expect much help from the school system or local media. Parents need to familiarize themselves with the bogus theories and methods, understand why they don’t work, and know that we can easily do better.