Why America Still Has a Reading Problem

8/7/2019 Why America Still Has a Reading Problem

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/why-america-still-has-a-reading-problem 1/16

still.)

(............ , ~ . q :

~li.{~..:

( 1';

a " : . " ~ ; ~ r~.~l'{}~~o;;.';'" "'4 , ~ ~" . ~, . J . . t;r

r> {- ~ ,'" ',~~

t.l f~J!l,.

]J1

" WhyAmerica

stillhas

areading

problem"

by

Samuel L. Blumenfeld

Published by the MASSACHUSETTS BRANCH of the

READING REFORM FOUNDATION

~,,~.~'..r..;:.~~.· " ; . ~ · < . ' ; '•• " ' . i • . f . · , ~ . , ' . l . J . ~ . d~ , f . - . , ' . ' i ' ' . •, ' ." , : ' . ' . - . 4. · ' , l . : , ·'~!.•,t - ;f ; ,· ~ s» ' ~ , T ,'il 'f'''i ~'~;t~ ~ .~.... ", .. . .-: .I 't .~ '1 :i ~ ~;~ ~..~.l-1...}: . ~ . r . ~ t : S

d a y~..

Education,

'...

telling

of phoniciu nd atio n. . .

Johnnj{~~eci( 1

o f~ .ren tIi.

Johnnv. s - : .

i

{)IIorlast

-e

~1,1~~.()} " ' i : j . ; : n t , , ' . ·. . ' , " . . . .~i.o;7',~

oJ '! > . . .

exptammg



Copyright © 1975 by Samuel L. Blumenfeld

"Why America Still Has a Reading Problem" was delivered on May 17, 1974, at the 13thAnnual Conference of the Reading Reform Foundation held in Washington, D. C. It was

subsequently published in The Reading Informer of July, 1974, and reprinted in a condensed

version in the Education Digest of October 1974.

"Twenty Years After Rudolf Flesch" was delivered on May 23, 1975, at the 14th Annual

Conference of the Reading Reform Foundation held in Scottsdale, Arizona. It was sub-

sequently published in Vital Speeches of July 15, 1975.

The Reading Reform Foundation is a non-profit educational organization founded in 1961by Watson Washburn "to restore the alphabet (phonetics) to its proper place as the basis of

elementary reading instruction in English." For further information about its conferences,

workshops, and publications write to Mrs. Raymond Rubicam, President, Reading Reform

Foundation, 7054 E. Indian School Road, Scottsdale, Arizona 85251.

Copies of this publication may be purchased for 50 cents each by writing to the Massachu-

setts Branch of the Reading Reform Foundation, clo 171 West Seventh Street, Boston,

Massachusetts 02127.

2



CONTENTS

WHY AMERICA STILL HAS A READING PROBLEM

page 5

TWENTY YEARS AFTER RUDOLF FLESCH

page 10

3



About the author:

SAMUEL L. BLUMENFELD is the author of HOW TO START YOUR OWN PRIVATE

SCHOOL - AND WHY YOU NEED ONE (1972), THE NEW ILLITERATES (1973), HOW

TO TUTOR (1973), and THE RETREAT FROM MOTHERHOOD (1975). Born and edu-

cated in New York, Mr. Blumenfeld has lived in Boston since 1965. Prior to authoring his

books, Mr. Blumenfeld spent ten years in the New York book publishing industry where he

was First Reader of The Viking Press and Editor of the Universal Library at Grosset & Dun-

lap. To gain first hand experience for his books on education, he served as a substitute

teacher for eighteen months in the public schools of Quincy, Massachusetts. His writings

have appeared in Esquire, Penthouse, The Reading Informer, Education Digest, and Vital

Speeches. He is chairman of the Massachusetts branch of the Reading Reform Foundation.

Mr. Blumenfeld's books are published by Arlington House, New Rochelle, NY.

4



Samuel L. Blumenfeld

by

"Wh y America still has a reading problem

Anyone who has kept tabs on the deteriorationof America's public educational system knows thatthe reading problem is at the heart of it, simplybecause you can't learn much of anything unlessyou can read with some proficiency. Despite thefact that more children are spending more time inschool than ever before, the ranks of the functionalilliterates are growing not by the thousands but bythe millions. In fact, a study published at HarvardUniversity and reported on the front page of theNew York Times of May 20, 1970,suggested thatas many as 50per cent of our adult population maybe functionally illiterate. And the tragic part of itall is that functional illiterates generally keep theirreading disability to themselves. Since they can'tread above a fourth-grade level, their lives areseverely limited in literary enjoyment or intel-lectual growth.The children who do come to the attention of the

school authorities are so obviously handicapped bytheir disability that no amount of hiding can keepthem from being detected. Such children are usu-

ally labeled as dyslexic. Dyslexia is an exotic wordinvented to describe the condition of a perfectlynormal, intelligent child, who, for reasons whichseem to baffle most educators, parents, and doc-tors, can't learn to read in the way he is beingtaught in school.The difference between a dyslexic and a func-

tional illiterate is purely social. Dyslexics are usu-ally adolescents from middle-class or professionalfamilies whose parents assume that their child'sreading problem is more of a medical orpsychological problem than an educational one.The child is too smart to be that dumb. A func-tional illiterate is simply someone who has kept hisreading problem to himself and goes through life

pretending he can read, avoiding situations whichinvolve reading, choosing jobs which do not revealhis reading disability. He assumes he's dumb, notsick or neurotic.

Dyslexic or illiterateBut whether you call him a dyslexic or a func-

tional illiterate, the origin of the problem is basi-cally the same. A child who can't read can'tbecause he really has not been taught to read. Yes,he has sat for hours and hours in his classroomand, yes, something vaguely resembling readinginstruction took place, but the child did not learnto read.Recently, I was asked to speak at a symposium

on dyslexia. I discovered that the great problemplaguing the experts on dyslexia is their inabilityto find its cause let alone define the term. Forexample, in 1972 the Maryland Commission onDyslexia was obliged to write the following in itsreport:"Despite the controversy over the use of the

term 'dyslexia,' however defined, and whateverappelation may be given to the term, there is a dis-order which manifests itself in an inability to learnto read by conventional pedagogical techniques."So I have decided to do what none of the experts

has dared to do, define the term dyslexia. Dyslexiais a learning disorder caused by applying hiero-glyphic instruction techniques in teaching childrento read an alphabetic writing system. First, I sayit is a learning disorder because we know that itcan be unlearned. That is, the technique for curingdyslexia is not a shot of penicillin or an eye opera-tion but merely unlearning and relearning how onewas taught to read. Second, dyslexia is a learningdisorder, not a disability, because the children whoget it are quite able to learn. There is nothing dis-abled about them. Their problem is that they learntoo well and they try too hard to assimilate whatcannot really be assimilated. Dyslexia is a learn-ing disorder because it is caused by a teaching

disorder. When you impose a hieroglyphic instruc-tion method on an alphabetic writing system youcreate symbolic disorder - that is, disorder in theuse, or I should say misuse, of symbols - which

5



in turn creates a learning disability, which in turncan be straightened out by creating symbolicorder.

Symbolic disorder

Now why are our teachers creating so muchsymbolic disorder? Because they don't know thedifference between a hieroglyphic writing system

and an alphabetic one. I venture to say that veryIew educators know the difference. and I includeprofessors on the highest level in our teachers col-leges.

To know the difference you have to know some-thing about the symbolic systems human beingsuse to communicate with one another. The mostextensive and efficient symbolic system we use isa sound system. That is, the sounds I make withmy voice have meaning to you because we haveall agreed that certain sounds will stand for cer-tain things. Thus you equate those sounds withspecific objects, people. places, ideas, feelings,actions. etc. As children. we all learned our firstfew thousand sound symbols - or words - by trial

and error associations. As adults we save time bygoing to the dictionary.However. as efficient and extensive as our sound

symbol system is. it has one serious drawback. Itleaves no permanent record, except in thememories of those who hear it. And memory ishardly permanent or accurate. So the need forgraphic symbols to supplement our sound symbolswas obvious. Since primitive language was simple,the first graphic system was also simple. A primi-tive spoken sentence might be something on theorder of: "Men hunt, kill many buffalo." To putthis in graphic form all you needed were simplepictures of men shooting bows and arrows at buf-

falo, some of which could be shown falling witharrows in their sides. You didn't have to go toschool to learn to read such a writing system. Thesymbols looked like the ideas they were conveying.But you probably needed training to draw the pic-tures. This early form of writing is known aspictography, or ideography. In pictography thesymbol looks like what it represents. We still usepictography in traffic signs and warning signs sothat children and foreigners can understand themeasily.

More complexities

As civilization and language became more com-plex so did the writing system. An ancient Egyp-

tian scribe might have had to record some legalmatters, or astronomical observations, or a his-tory of Pharoah Ramses II. So he had to havemany more little pictures representing many moreactions, ideas, and objects. And in order to insureaccuracy he had to make the symbols as unam-biguous as possible. He had to have different littlepictures to convey such abstract ideas as open,closed, inside, deity, growth, become, etc. So theEgyptians began to use phonetic clues, whichwould tie the picture to a specific word in their lan-guage. This highly elaborated picture systembecame known as hieroglyphics because so manyof the sym boIs did not look like anything theyrepresented. You had to be taught what the sym-

bols stood for. So now you did have to go to schoolto learn how to read, and you had to learn themeanings of thousands of symbols and all the littlemarkings that designated tenses, persons, andinflectional endings, and all of the phonetic clues

and context clues and pictographic clues. Becausereading was now so difficult, literacy became theexclusive province of a small group of scholarswho devoted their entire lives to perfecting theirreading and writing skills.

The need for a simpler system was obvious andit came with the invention of the alphabet at about1600B.C., the greatest single invention in man'sintellectual history. The invention was based on aremarkable discovery, the discovery that ourthousands and thousands of spoken words weremerely the combinations of only a very smallnumber of irreducible voice sounds.

22symbols

The superiority of the alphabetic method was inits economy. In place of thousands of symbols, allyou had to learn were about twenty-two symbolsrepresenting the known gamut of speech sounds atthe time of the first alphabet, and you could dis-pense with all of the phonetic clues, and contextclues, and pictographic clues, and other complica-

tions. The difference was as dramatic as goingfrom candles to electric lights, and all the civilizednations of the Western world adopted the new writ-ing system. Its advantages were obvious. It per-mitted a greater precision in the recording ofspoken language and therefore a greater precisionin conveying thought. It permitted a muchsmoother integration of the reading process withthe speaking and thinking processes. It sparkedthe greatest intellectual advance since the begin-ning of time because it accelerated learning.After the invention of the alphabet, learning to

read consisted solely of mastering the alphabet let-ters and acquiring a facility to translate a running

inscription into the spoken language it repre-sented. Its simplicity and economy were stunning.Now, it so happens that children had been taught

to read precisely by this method until a ratherfreakish development in the early 1800s. Over thecenturies the English writing system haddeveloped a number of problems. First, it hadadopted from Latin an alphabet of 26letters to dothe job of representing some 44 sounds. Second, itwas enriched by the invasions of other languages.Third, pronunciations kept changing over the cen-turies. The result, by 1800,was a writing systemwith a large number of quaint and perhaps bother-some irregularities and inconsistencies. However,the writing system was still purely alphabetic.

Nevertheless, by 1820 the clamor for instruc-tional reform was so shrill among the professionalreformers that anything which promised a short-cut through the difficulties of learning to readalphabetically was welcomed. At about this time,the Rev. Thomas H. Gallaudet, director of theHartford Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb, thoughtthat he could solve the problem. For years he hadbeen teaching deaf children to read by a sight-symbol method - that is, the association of a pic-ture of a cat with a written word cat, and so forth.In this way, the deaf child was able to develop areading vocabulary based on sight associationsonly, that is, a "sight vocabulary." Gallaudetthought that he could adapt this method for use by

normal children. He published a primer based onthe method, and in 1837it was adopted by the Bos-ton school system. You'll be interested to knowthat the three main characters in the primer wereFrank, Jane and a dog named Spot.

6



Disastrous look-sayFor the next eight years, children in Boston were

taught to read English by this "look-say" or

"sight-word" or "sight vocabulary" method inwhich whole words were learned as hieroglyphics.The results were so disastrous that the Bostonschools finally discarded Gallaudet's method andreturned to the alphabet. But the teaching of read-

ing in America would never be the same, for Gal-laudet's method did not die. It went undergroundand surfaced some decades later, divorced fromits deaf and dumb origins, and entered the main-stream of educational instruction as a perfectlylegitimate way to teach children to read. By 1945it had swept the alphabetic method out of readinginstruction completely in the United States andwas considered the only way to teach children toread. As our reading problem grew, parents andeducators were at a loss to explain the reasons forit, until 1955when Rudolf Flesch exposed the situa-tion in his famous book, Why Johnny Can't Read.In that book Flesch had said very bluntly:The teaching of reading - all over the United

States, in all the schools, and in all the textbooks- is totally wrong and flies in the face of all logic

and common sense.

What was the reaction of America's educators tothis blunt statement? They closed ranks behind en-

trenched and institutionalized error and continueddoing the same thing: using hieroglyphic instruc-tion techniques to teach children to read an

alphabetic writing system, teaching normalAmerican children to read as if they were deaf.The result is that in 1974 we still have a readingproblem which still baffles the educators.In writing my book I did something which had

not been done by previous researchers and writers

on dyslexia and functional illiteracy. I made avery detailed and thorough examination of thereading instruction books being used in the schoolsand I came to the conclusion that most of the chil-dren exposed to these sight vocabulary or hiero-glyphic instruction methods would in time exhibitthe symptoms of dyslexia. What are the symp-toms? Roger Saunders, president of the OrtonSociety, described them very succinctly as fol-

lows:

It is not uncommon to find, particularly in dys-lexic children below the fourth-grade level, regard-less of their age, words read in reverse, for exam-ple was as saw, on as no. A single letter may bereversed, as in dig and big. Often also there may

be a transposition of some of the letters within aword, for example, abroad for aboard, left for felt,how for who. General confusion of words whichhave only a slightly different configura tionabounds, for example through, though, thought,and quit, quiet, quite .... Guesses are frequent,in view of the inability to handle the sounds-symbolsystem. They grasp for the meaning of unknownwords on the basis of a few clues the rest of theprinted material has furnished. It is also possiblethat, while working out a difficult word, there maybe such a long pause that the meaning of the pre-viously read words will escape them.

Learning breakdown

In The New Illiterates I devoted four chapters toan analysis of the Dick and Jane reading programin order to demonstrate why the use of hiero-glyphic instruction techniques on an alphabetic

writing system creates reading disability. Thereason why this happens is because you set up con-flicting learning habits in the child, which finallyleads to a learning breakdown. Obviously teachers

are not aware that they are doing this. In fact,after a talk I gave in Providence a few weeks ago,a young man came up to me and asked how comethe Chinese didn't get dyslexia. Weren't they being

taught to read hieroglyphically? Yes, I answered.But their writing system was a hieroglyphic one,and there was no other way to teach it. Their heiro-glyphics were distinctive enough. But our alphabe-

tic words were not. How could you distinguish be-tween such similar looking words as bad, bed, bid,and bud unless you had a firm understanding ofour alphabetic system?In any case, I realized that it is not readily

apparent to teachers why you cannot apply hiero-glyphic teaching techniques to written English. Mybook explains why in great detail and I urge youall to read it. One of the most difficult things inthe world, I've discovered, is getting someone toread a book - that includes book reviewers,

education editors, and teachers. However, there isno easy way to learning, and any teacher who

thinks that there is, is not only kidding himself butkidding his students. Anthony Burgess, theauthor, said recently, "One should not be annoyed

because learning is difficult .... Overcomingobstacles is one of the greatest pleasures in theworld." And so teachers willhave to make a consid-erable effort if they are to improve their perfor-

mance. The simple and shocking truth is that thegreatest obstacle to literacy in America are theteachers of America. They cannot teach children

to read because they really don't know how. Confu-sion over instructional technique has become the

greatest obstacle to their endeavors. But since Iam afraid that the teachers in this audience maynot get a chance to study in detail what I have writ-ten, and since I am anxious for them to gain as

much knowledge and insight as possible from mytalk at this conference, let me summarize whyapplying hieroglyphic teaching techniques to analphabetic writing system not only makes func-tional illiteracy and dyslexia possible but inevit-able for many children.

Learning alphabetFIRST, there is the lack of adequate instruction

in learning the letters of the alphabet, their namesand shapes, or their sound values before readingwhole words. Just learning the alphabet withoutlearning what the letters mean is not sufficientpreparation for reading. The child must be taught

that the letters stand for something more thanmere graphic decoration. If not, he will have trou-ble differentiating between such similar letters asd and b, or p, g, and q, or f and t. He will not under-stand why the small details in letters are impor-tant.SECOND, in most sight basal programs, there is

a deliberate obscuring of the alphabetic principle

in the very choice of pre-primer vocabulary, whichincludes some of the most highly irregular wordsin the language.THIRD, the child is taught to look at a word as

a whole and to associate it with a picture - whichis pure deaf and dumb instruction. He is taught toassociate the whole word with an idea, rather thanto see it as a sequence of letters with sound values.

7



In the 1955Dick and Jane, for example, he wastaught to divide words into three pictorial parts -beginnings, middles, and ends - regardless of theword's phonetic structure. In many programs heis supposed to remember word-form details bysuch inane configuration techniques as word block-ing or framing. This cultivates the really cripplinghabit of looking at words from all directions, thuscontributing to his later failure to read words fromleft to right or reading them in reverse. After all,when you look at a picture in a frame you don'tlook at it from left to right. It also contributes topoor spelling and confusing such similar lookingwords as quit, quiet, and quite. Some pre-primersintersperse the text with rebus drawings, thusencouraging the child to believe that alphabeticwords are little pictures representing objects andideas instead of being sound-symbol transcriptionsof spoken words which represent the objects andideas. This creates associational confusion andsymbolic disorder.FOURTH, the tremendous emphasis on story

and picture interpretation at this early stage ofinstruction distracts the child from the sufficientlydifficult task of mastering written words.FIFTH, an unconscious taboo against the

alphabetic principle may be inculcated if the letternames are studiously not mentioned in the pre-primer stage, although the child may want to knowthem. This was the case in the 1955Scott Foresmanprogram. None of the experts has yet identified orevaluated the psychic damage done by thisdeliberate withholding of information which wouldfacilitate the child's understanding of the alphabe-tic principle. Some children are extremely suscep-tible to subliminal suggestion, and the implicitsuggestion that they must not learn the letters maybecome embedded in their unconscious, creating alater resistance to learning the alphabetic princi-ple on their own, which is one of the reasons whyfunctional illiterates who were taught to read inthe 1950sand 1960sare frozen at their present levelof ignorance.SIXTH, in many sight-word programs the child

is taught about whole words and sentences beforehe knows anything about individual letters, thusreversing the natural and logical order of learning.SEVENTH, he is deliberately made dependent

on a controlled context for his ability to read,which makes him insecure and helpless when con-fronted with books without a similarly controlled

context.

Functional illiteracyThus, in the pre-primer stage alone, there is

enough in sight-vocabulary instruction to set thechild on the road to functional illiteracy and dys-lexia before we even get to the so-called attackskills. The pre-primers, with their first 58 or sosight words, inculcate all of the bad habits thechild needs to prevent him from becoming a goodreader. And I have not even mentioned the deaden-ing effect that the constant repetition of sightwords can have on a child who may grow to hatereading because of its stupifying boredom. Butmost damaging of all, sight-word instruction pro-

vides him with a basic erroneous concept about thenature of our writing system, a concept which canremain unchanged throughout life.For example, I tutored a Boston University med-

ical student who had been taught to read by Dick

and Jane at an expensive private school. He hatedto read and didn't know why. Here was his defini-tion of the ablphabet: "A set ofsymbols, a combina-tion of which form larger symbols we call wordsand the words in turn should form in our minds pic-tures of an object, an action." If you noticed, therewasn't the slightest hint or suggestion that thosesymbols stood for sounds. This student was a per-fect product of the sight-word method. and hehated to read although he was bright. articulate, .and highly intelligent. He simply had no idea whatan alphabet ic writing system was about. It tookhim several weeks before he finallv understoodthat the alphabet was a set of symbols repre-senting speech sounds.Now what kind of an educational system do we

have that can't even teach children to understandwhat the alphabet is about? I leave it to you to findthe right descriptive adjective. "But we do teachphonetics," some of the teachers will say. "Weteach initial consonants and final consonants,"they add. Yes, they do, but they teach them as

phonetic clues - just one clue among severaltaught as word-attack skills.What is "word attack"?, some naive parent may

ask. Since whole words can be hostile little crittersif you have no idea what the letters stand for, youhave to find a means to "attack" them. So we'vebeen teaching our children to "attack" words forthe last 40years instead of read them. Now I knowwhy some of the college students I've talked tohate words. I suppose you would grow to hatesomething you've been taught to attack sincegrade one. And so every child who has had to learna sight vocabulary has been fighting his own littlewar with words. When reading becomes somethingof your own miniature schoolroom Vietnam, neverending, with new enemies everywhere, you maygrow to hate it quite easily. In the case of the func-tional illiterate, by the time he reaches the fourthgrade he admits he cannot defeat the enemy and,like America in Vietnam, he makes peace andwithdraws. He pledges that he will never attackwords again. He leaves them alone, and they leavehim alone.

Sound-symbol ignoredUsing Dick and Jane as our model, when the

child gets to the primer he is finally introduced tothe names of 17consonant letters and their soundsmerely as phonetic clues. The sound-symbol struc-ture of a word beyond its first letter is ignored. He

must still rely on the memory of word forms toincrease his reading vocabulary. In the Book Onereader, the child is taught how to apply his knowl-edge of consonant letters to the ends of words, sothat now he can attack from the front or rear. Themiddle still remains unknown territory.Not until the Book Two level does the child

encounter his first vowel letter. He already hashad to learn 335 words by sight without knowinganything about vowels. The vowels are also taughtas phonetic clues, but very tricky clues becausetheir sounds keep changing. So how do you knowwhich sound is the right one? You have to learna whole battery of phonetic rules governing vowelsounds and how adjoining consonant letters serve

as visual clues to the phonetic clues. Of course thechild still doesn't know what a syllable is, althoughby the completion of the second level he has sup-posedly increased his sight vocabulary to 879words.

8



Finally, at level three, he is introduced to theconcept of the syllable, the pronunciation unit, andthe rules governing the syllabication of words.After two years of dividing words into three pictor-ial parts, he is now told of a new way to dividewords that conflicts with the old way. Since hemust still learn many new sight words, he cannotpossibly abandon the old way of dividing words.Thus, the child is placed in the cruel and unenvi-able position of having to comply with two differ-ent methods of looking at words and wonderingwhich to choose. Sometimes I wonder what kind ofan educator concocted this refined form of class-room torture.

Rejecting phoneticsIt is at this third level, where the mixture of

sight-vocabulary and phonetic methods createssuch confusion, complexity, contradictions, andgeneral pedagogical chaos that the eight-year-oldcan take no more of it. He rejects the phoneticsbecause the authors manage to create almost asmany phonetic rules and exceptions to the rules asthere are words. In addition, like Pavlov's dogs,

these children are confronted with conflictinginstructions and information: alphabetic informa-tion disguised as phonetic clues which contradictsthree years of hieroglyphic training in which thealphabetic principle has been deliberatelyobscured and misrepresented. This is the learningconfusion and conflict which creates in the child afull-blown reading neurosis. The child's intelli-gence tells him that written English is an alphabeticsystem but his training tells him that it isn't. Butan eight - year - old cannot permit his intelligenceto revolt against the authority of his training. Sohe has a learning breakdown. That is why parentsand doctors are puzzled by dyslexics who areconsidered "too smart to be that dumb." There are

other children, however, who in their frustrationdo strike out against the authority of their training

by burning down the school. Kenneth Polk andWalter Schafer, in their recent book Schools andDelinquency, tell us:"Only in recent years has the enormity of educa-

tional failure been fully recognized. The rising rateof juvenile delinquency and adolescent alienationare causing increasing alarm .... We propose thateducational failure - by schools as well as by stu-dents - is directly related to delinquency ....Unless basic, radical, and immediate educationalchanges are made, delinquency will continue toincrease - and will be accompanied by the spreadof other social ills that stem from the same roots."So now you can see the long-range disastrous

res ul ts of app lying hieroglyphic teach ingtechniques to an alphabetic writing system. Andplease don't tell me that the new eclectic basal pro-grams are better than Dick and Jane. Some ofthem are worse. If you want to know why, read theevaluations I've made of them in my book. I'vedone my homework. Now it is up to you to doyours.In closing let me say that I do not enjoy criticiz-

ing others, particularly teachers. I remember myown primary school days with fondness. My firstgrade teacher was a sweet lady named Miss Sulli-van and I remember learning the alphabet and theshort vowel sounds and seeing words on flashcards and reading Aesop's Fables. That was overforty years ago in a New York public school beforeanyone had ever heard of word attack or eon textclues or configuration clues and phonetic clues;before anyone knew that learning to read could bea problem. My hope is not to turn back the clockto happier times but to help us all recognize andunderstand the horrendous mistakes that havebeen made. Forty years of this slght-vocabularvnightmare are enough. Lets get back to t he

alphabet and get A meri can education back on t h e -

road to sanity.

9



Twenty Years After Rudolf FleschARE THE NEW BASAL READING PROGRAMS DOING THE JOB?

By SAMUEL L. BLUMENFELD, Author

Delivered at the 14th Annual Reading Reform Foundation Conference, Scottsdale, Arizona, May 23, 1975

THIS is the twentieth anniversary of the publica-

tion of Rudolf Flesch's famous book, Why JohnnyCan't Read. It is probably the single most important

book on American education published in the twentieth cen-

tury, because it identified and exposed to public view the

cause of the most serious educational problem this country

has ever faced, to wit: the inability of our educational

system to teach our children to read at the level required by

the complexity of our civilization. Rudolf Flesch made

America aware that there was indeed an identifiable cause

to what was already, in 1955, a staggering reading problem:

the cause was the wholesale adoption by virtually all of our

schools of the look-say or sight vocabulary method ofteaching children to read. What did look-say actually do

that was so horrible and illogical? It converted our English

writing system, which is alphabetic, into a hieroglyphic

system, which it is not. And the tragic experience of the last

forty years has taught us unequivocally that you cannot

teach an alphabetic writing system hieroglyphically. To

attempt to do so results in functional illiteracy, reading dis-

ability, dyslexia, strephosymbolia, or anything else you

want to call it.

I don't have to tell you what kind of a reception American

educators gave Rudolf Flesch's book. Time magazine of

January 9,1956, summing up the events of 1955, put it very

succinctly:

If 1955 was notable for anything as far as the U.S.public school is concerned, it may be that it will be

remembered as the Year of Rudolf Flesch ...

American education closed ranks against Flesch,

and when educators were not denouncing the "Devil in

the Flesch," they were damning the "Flesch

peddlers." Nevertheless, though Johnny was marredby flagrant exaggerations, it remained on the

bestseller list for thirty-nine weeks, and thousands of

parents - and teachers - found in Flesch the angrily

dramatic spokesman they had been waiting for.

Contrary to what Time said, there were no flagrant ex-

aggerations in Dr. Flesch's book. If anything, the book un-

derestimated the long-range impact of look-say on our

educational system, and it certainly overestimated the in-tegrity and intelligence of our educators. In fact, as Dr.

Flesch pointed out to me himself, he was naive in assuming

that the educational establishment would respond favorably

to his findings, that is, to the eleven or so test studies which

proved phonics to be superior to look-say in beginning

reading instruction. Today, Dr. Flesch takes a very dim

view of the situation. He wrote me a year and a half ago:

"I've by now arrived at the philosophical conclusion that the

end of the American Empire is foreordained, and that Viet-

nam, Watergate, and our educational catastrophe are all

part of the inevitable process of history." These are very

pessimistic words. However, I don't believe that the process

of our decline is inevitable, or foreordained. I believe thatwe still have the power to reverse the trend. I don't believe

that we have gone beyond the point of no return. Human

beings have remarkable resilience and there are numerous

modern examples illustrating this. Who would have thought

in 1945 when Germany and Japan lay in ruins that twenty

years later they would be among the most affluent industrial

nations of the free world? So it is possible to recover from

disaster if not avoid it.

What we must ask ourselves is what is it about the

American educational system or establishment which has

made reading reform - a return to the alphabet via inten-

sive phonics - so difficult to bring about? Why is there such

resistance to common sense among educators? In my speech

last year, I stated that the greatest obstacle to literacy in

America are the teachers of America because they don't

know how to teach our children to read. And the single

group of people most responsible for creating this situationare those who teach our teachers: the professors of educa-

tion who live in an academic dreamworld all their own. The

look-say method was dreamed up among them and handed

down to the classroom teacher. Somewhere in the early part

of the century a few professors of education decided that our

alphabetic writing system could be better taught as a

hieroglyphic writing system. There was no scientific

evidence to support this idea, since at no time had the

English writing system been taught as hieroglyphics except

briefly in Boston from 1837 to 1844. That experiment was

failure then, but that fact was unknown to our professors of

education who were busy writing the new look-say text-

books.

Many classroom teachers rejected this idiotic look-sayidea from the beginning. But that was thirty years ago. To-

day, most of our younger teachers have been thoroughly

brainwashed by their professors of education to believe that

our English writing system is indeed a hieroglyphic one. It is

possible to convince many of them that it isn't, but not easy.

For when you reach them you must often break through a

sometimes fanatic prejudice against intensive phonics in-

stilled by their professors.

When most of us think of public education we think of the

neighborhood school and some of the good teachers who

taught us the basics. But that school building is simply the

tip of the iceberg. Far more important is the hierarchal

structure of public education which determines what is

taught in those classrooms, and that hierarchal structure,hidden from public view, is far more powerful and all per-

vasive than the visible teacher. To find out what it is think-

ing and doing you must read the educational journals,

belong to educational organizations, attend educational

conferences, and look over the textbooks the professors of

education write.

Two weeks ago the International Reading Association -

the citadel of look-say, better known as the IRA - held its

twentieth annual convention in New York City. I was

tempted to attend, but after looking over its 56-page

program in the January issue of The Reading Teacher, I

decided that I would be wasting my time. Here's a sample of

some of the symposia offered to the conventioneers:

Models and Techniques for the Construction and

Implementation of a Behavioral Objectives Continuum.

Developing Assessment Instruments for Measuring

Affective-Domain Objectives in Reading.

10



Practical Applications to the Cloze Procedure.

An Individualized Module for Training Teachers and

Prospective Teachers to Administer a Reading-Placement

Inventory.

Some Closure on Cloze; Beyond Placement to Teaching.

Saturation Tactics in Reading.

The Relationship Between Growth in Syntactic Complex-

ity of Oral and Written Language and Reading Comprehen-sion.

Hierarchal and Holistic Structure: Should Reading Be

Taught As a Series of Subskills Or As a Holistic Process?

Instructional Practices that Contribute to Sight

Vocabulary Deficiencies.

Format of Modules for Competency-Based University

Programs.

Issues and Applications of Criterion-Referenced Reading

Measures.

I could go on and on, but I'm sure you get the point. The

professors of education have made the teaching of reading

so incredibly complex that you begin to wonder if the in-

tellectually confusing environment of the college of educa-

tion itself produces its own form of insanity. All of thesepeople live in a world of "research," "graduate studies,"

and doctoral dissertations made increasingly complex

because of the need to justify the existence of a couple of

thousand Ph.D's, exacting more and more money from the

educational bureaucracy.

Of course Rudolf Flesch was attacked as simplistic when

his book came out. And in fact it was simplistic by its very

nature, because the alphabet is very simple when compared

to hieroglyphics. In fact, the alphabet was invented to make

reading and writing as simple as possible. The hieroglyphic

system had become so cumbersome, complex, unwieldy,

and difficult, that the alphabet had to be invented. But as

simple as the alphabet is, it is based on a very profound dis-

covery: that all of spoken language can be reduced to arelatively small number of irreducible voice sounds. That is

the significant idea in back of the alphabet. That is the idea

that gives the alphabet such incredible power. That is the

idea that in the slow-moving ancient world made

hieroglyphics obsolete overnight. And that is the idea com-

pletely unknown to most of America's top professors of

education.

It is interesting to note that the International Reading

Association was founded a year after Rudolf Flesch's book

came out by those professors of education who had written

all of those look-say textbooks. Its first president, in fact,

was William Scott Gray, the chief author of Dick and Jane.

The IRA told American teachers to keep on teaching

reading as if Why Johnny Can't Read had never been

written.

In 1955 when Johnny was published, there was only one

phonics textbook on the market in all of America, the Hay-

Wingo Reading With Phonics published by Lippincott. But

it wasn't until 1963 - a full eight years later - that the

publishing industry began to respond to the demand for a

return to phonics. In that year Lippincott published the

McCracken and WaIcutt Basic Reacing phonics program,

Open Court published its phonics reading program, and the

Economy Company came out with Phonetic Keys toReading. But the big companies - Scott Foresman, Mac-

millan, Ginn, Harper & Row, Houghton Mifflin, etc. -

continued to publish and sell their look-say readingprograms, all of which were given the full support of the

educational establishment through the IRA, its

publications, teacher training programs, and conferences.

So for the first eight years after the Flesch book was

published, virtually nothing was done by the educational

establishment to change anything. In 1967 Dr. Jeanne

Chall, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, after

five years of research, published her book, Learning toRead: The Great Debate, with irrefutable evidence that a

"code emphasis" method, that is, the alphabet, used in

beginning reading instruction produced better readers than

methods which began with a "meaning emphasis," that is,

look-say. Dr. Chall, however, qualified her findings. She

wrote:

I cannot emphasize too strongly that the evidence

does not endorse anyone code-emphasis method over

another ...

Nor can I emphasize too strongly that I recommend

a code emphasis only as a beginning reading method

- a method to start the child on - and that I do not

recommend ignoring reading-for-meaning practice.

So you can see that even though many of us assumed that

Dr. Chall meant intensive phonics when she was talking

about code-emphasis, look-say people equally assumed that

she meant something much more watered down. By theway, when did the alphabet suddenly become a "code"?

Why was learning the alphabet now described as "breaking

the code"? What was behind this change in terminology?

The use of the word "code" came from the linguists, notably

from the linguist Leonard Bloomfield. Bloomfield had

become interested in reading instruction and found that the

methods used to teach children to read in America were in

complete violation of the findings of linguistics, and he

elaborated on this in a long essay in the April and May 1942

issues of the Elementary English Review. His views could be

summed up as follows:

(1) The English writing system is an alphabetic one as op-posed to the Chinese system which is ideographic. (2) The

spoken language is composed of a limited number of iden-tifiable, distinctive sounds, which he called phonemes, eachof which is represented in the written language by a

grapheme. In teaching a child to read, it was necessary to

first teach him the phoneme-grapheme correspondances.

Since there are approximately 46 phonemes in our language

(some say only 44) and an alphabet of 26 letters to represent

them, some graphemes are composed of one or more letters

including letters which may be silent. (3) Because English

spelling is so highly irregular, the phoneme-grapheme

relationships should be taught by presenting the child with

one-syllable words from regular spelling patterns first, and

introducing the irregular spelling patterns after the regular

ones have been mastered. The letter sounds should not be

taught in isolation, because they are not used as such in or-dinary speech. The sounds of the letters should be inferred

by the learning of one-syllable words in regular, easily

recognizable spelling patterns.

On this last and very important point, Dr. Chall wrote:

"Bloomfield was even more strongly opposed to

sounding and blending than the authors of the conven-

tional basal-reading programs. Like the proponents of

the conventional wisdom, he insisted that words

always be read as wholes. Unlike these proponents,

however, he urged that the letters be mastered (iden-

tified by name) before word reading is started. When a

new word is taught or when a child fails to recognize a

word, Bloomfield said, he should spell it (say theletters), not sound it."

So you can see that the intrusion of Bloomfield's anti-

phonics linguistic doctrine could open the door to unlimited

11



mischief. You and I know that you cannot teach intensive

phonics without teaching the child to isolate the letter

sounds. Thus, when Dr. Chall used the phrase "code

emphasis," she did not necessarily mean intensive phonics.

And that is why the look-say establishment, although it was

critical of Dr. Chall's book, was nowhere as hostile towardher as they were toward Dr. Flesch. In fact, Dr. Chall was

the featured speaker at this year's IRA convention in NewYork.

Meanwhile, the publishers of the look-say basal-reading

programs, in bringing out new basal programs, incor-

porated a great deal of linguistic thinking. So now we hear a

lot about coding, decoding, and uncoding, graphemes and

phonemes, etc. Since no one is quite sure what anyone

means, you can get away with an awful lot of messy, half-

baked pedagogy. Before I give you a few samples of such

pedagogy in the current basal programs, let me say a word

about the linguists. First, I don't like the word code. Code

denotes something secret and difficult to figure out. The dic-

tionary defines code as: a set of signals representing letters

or numerals, used in sending messages, as by telegraph,

flags, etc., or a system of secret writing in which letters,figures, etc., are arbitrarily given certain meanings.

Now the alphabet is not a secret code that the child is sup-

posed to figure out on his own from whole words. It is a set

of well-known symbols with very specific well-known

meanings, and it should be taught to the child as

systematically, logically, and openly as possible. I disagree

with the linguistic objection to voicing isolated sounds,

because it infers that the child is not intelligent enough to

learn the meanings of 26 letters. When you consider that a

child of six comes to the first grade with a speaking

vocabulary of at least several thousand words, all of which

he has taught himself through trial and error, I cannot for

the life of me understand why educators think he cannot

learn the sound meanings of 26 alphabet letters. It is vitallyimportant for the child to understand the concept of the

alphabet - that speech sounds can be isolated and

represented on the printed page by letters. What is so

terribly difficult about this concept? Why not tell the child

the alphabet letters stand for speech sounds and teach him

what letters stand for what sounds?

The fact is that our educators, for some peculiar reason,

underestimate the intelligence of the normal child, they un-

derestimate his intellectual curiosity, they underestimate the

seriousness with which he goes about learning to speak his

own language, they underestimate how stimulating and en-

joyable such intellectual work can be.

But you don't underestimate a child when you teach him

intensive phonics. You are telling him: "Look, I think

you're intelligent enough to learn this." And the child ap-

preciates your confidence.

As you'd expect, the basal-reading programs published

after the Chall book incorporated a great deal of pseudo-

linguistic nonsense in their look-say methodology. Let me

give you an example of some of this nonsense. In 1969 Ginn

& Company came out with its new basal program, Reading

360. They went hog wild with their own version of

linguistics. To start with they violated the first principle of

the linguistic approach: not to use pictures. The Ginn begin-

ning program is crammed full of big, powerful, distracting

pictures, as are all the other basal programs. The cost of all

this artwork must be staggering. As in all the look-sayprograms, the new Ginn program teaches the letters as

phonetic clues. The vowels are not taught until level 3. To

teach the vowel sounds, the authors contrived about as com-

plicated a way of doing it as possible, using completely new

terminology. In the Reading 360 program there is no longer

any such thing as a short or long vowel. There are now

"glided" and "unglided" vowel sounds. The glided vowel

sound is introduced on page 73 of the Teacher's Edition

(Level 3) in this way:

Repeat the word kite, emphasizing the medial vowel

sound. Identify this sound as a glided vowel sound.

Help the children understand that "glide" means tomove smoothly from one place to another - the way a

sailboat moves across the water, or the way a skater

moves across the ice.

Demonstrate the meaning of a glided vowel sound

by slowly pronouncing lay I to show that the sound

slides from [e], as infather, to liy/, as in me. Tell thechildren that the English language has several glided

vowel sounds, and lay I, 'as in kite, is one of them.

Encourage the children to pronounce lay I severaltimes, so they can hear the sound glide from [e ] to

liy I and feel the jaw move as the sound is being

pronounced. Reinforce awareness of this sound by

asking the children to repeat the following: lay I ride,

layl side, layl white, layl dime.Now what purpose is served by teaching a child that the

long isound is divided into two parts and that your jaw

glides from one part to the next? None whatever, except

perhaps to make him tongue-tied. The old look-say books

gave him a reading disability. Now they want to add a

speech impediment. In phonics, we teach a child to identify

the long isound because it is represented by a particular

letter and by particular spelling patterns. There is no reason

to care whether it glides or does somersaults. Incidentally, is

long e a glided or unglided vowel? Eeeeee. I wonder how

they handle that one. In the Ginn 360 simple short vowels

are taught as "unglided" vowels. The silent e is now called

the "e marker," and a syllabic unit is now called a

"graphemic base." The look-say people used to argue thatphonics was too difficult to teach a six-year-old. So now

they give him a course in college linguistics.

Another example of modern pedagogical madness is the

Scott Foresman Reading Systems program, published in

1971 to replace Dick and Jane. If you think Dick and Jane

was bad, wait till you see this mess. It is no doubt the most

confusing, ill-conceived reading instruction program ever

put together by a small army of PhDs.

Here's their definition of reading: "The interaction

between the reader and written language through which the

reader tries to reconstruct the message from the writer.

Learning to read involves the acquisition of the concepts,

skills, and comprehension strategies needed to understand,

use, enjoy, and evaluate the messages communicated in

various kinds of written language." That definition, of

course, can apply to the reading of anything from Chinese

ideographs to Egyptian hieroglyphics. It connotes breaking

the code of some horribly complex system of symbols as im-

penetrable as the Rosetta Stone. The key concept in the

Scott Foresman system is "comprehension strategies,"

which is really just a new way 0 f saying "word attack."

Here's how the Scott Foresman people describe their own

system:

There are so many different cues to meaning. In

Scott Foresman Reading Systems, teaching children

to read is teaching them how to recognize these cues

and use them as strategies.Pictures provide cues to meaning in books. At early

levels pictures are used, often with the initial conso-

nant, to provide the cue to a word ...

The context of what children are reading can

12



today because we are dealing with an educational system in

a chronic state of disintegration and confusion, in the

process of destroying every vestige of structure and tradi-

tion. And when some parents in some towns and cities try to

get their.schools back to teaching the basics, the progressive

educators get together and start planning strategies to

defeat them. Now that the classrooms have been opened up

to sex education, behavior modification, sensitivity training,

tranquilizing drugs, forced busing, team teaching, and every

other possible kind of experimentation, the reading-methods controversy is brushed aside as irrelevant or old

hat. Most teachers assume that the controversy between

look-say and phonics was settled long ago, in favor of look-

say, of course. If you bring it up they give you that "Not

again" look.

So the battle is far from won. But it is being won because

those of us who advocate intensive phonics are much better

prepared and far more knowledgeable than we were ten

years ago. It is being won because each year we win more

valuable allies in the educational system. It is being won

because people like Bettina Rubicam and Kathy Diehl and

countless others have persevered through thick and thin to

bring the message of phonics to whomever will listen.

Let me end my speech by telling you about one mother inthe borough of Queens, New York, Mrs. Barbara Franz, a

widow, who six months ago took her six-year-old son Johnny

out of the first grade of the local public school because she

became aware that they were not teaching him how to read

but how to word guess. She decided to tutor him at home

with the alphabet. Now what is interesting is that Mrs.

Franz had never heard of phonics, or Dr. Flesch, or the

Reading Reform Foundation. But she knew enough about

the alphabet to know that Johnny wasn't being taught it.

The Board of Education decided to take Mrs. Franz to

court as a negligent parent. Meanwhile, her sister had given

her a copy of Why Johnny Can't Read, and suddenly she

became aware of the whole phonics-look-say controversy

that has been raging for the last twenty years. She got in

touch with Dr. Flesch who decided to testify in her behalf as

parison. an expert. I became aware of the case in a conversation with

It's not difficult to see why Dr. Flesch is pessimistic twen- Dr. Flesch, and I shall also be testifying in Mrs. Franz's

ty years after the publication of his book. Law schools com- behalf. On May 1, I went down to New York to appear at a

plain about law students who can't write a brief. Medical hearing. The hearing was postponed, but during the visit I

schools complain about medical students who can't read got to meet both Johnny and Dr. Flesch. For me, it was a

their medical books. The SAT scores decline year after tremendously moving moment.

year, and the educators complain that there must be The other day Mrs. Franz sent me a copy of a letter to her

something wrong with the tests. In 1972 reading scores in from Irving Anker, Chancellor of the New York City Board

New York City schools were the worst ever recorded. Only of Education, explaining their position on phonics. He

32 percent of the pupils were reading at or above grade level. wrote:

In 1973 the Board of Education in New York became "The attached material from Nila Blanton Smith's stan-

jubilant because the score had risen to 33.8 percent, a less dard text Reading Instruction for Today's Children dealsthan 2 percent improvement over the previous year. And in with this controversy over methodology in the teaching of

1974 New York was satisfied because the scores held steady reading, and should be of interest to you. The enclosed New

at 33.8 percent. At the same time it was revealed that.there York State Position Paper on reading, based on sound

had been widespread cheating on the tests, so we can be sure research, sums up the position with which the city manuals

that the real scores are probably much lower than the concur. Phonics as a word attack skill is used in our schools

recorded ones. Also, the tests were no doubt based on eclec- in the teaching of reading, together with other essential

tic, sight-vocabulary reading standards, so you can imagine skills."the extent of the reading disaster in the nation's largest So there you have the official position twenty years after

school system. Is there any excuse for this disgraceful and Rudolf Flesch, the same position they had twenty years ago.

tragic educational catastrophe which is destroying the Nila Banton Smith, of course, is the official historian of the

literacy of a nation? International Reading Association, and it's her book that

The major difference between now and twenty years ago Mr. Anker cites as authority.

is that today the parent can get help in teaching his child in- And so the struggle goes on. But when I saw little Johnny's

tensive phonics, whereas in 1955 or 1960 he would have been face light up because I had come to help him and histotally lost. Yet, twenty years ago there were still plenty of mother, I knew that this was the most worthwhile struggle

old-timers who could teach bootleg phonics. Today, not in America today. Johnny exists. He is a real little boy fac-

many parents even know that their children need help and ing an educational system determined to destroy his in-

we have thousands of young teachers who can barely read tellect. And we must be equally determined to see that this

and write themselves. So in a sense our task is more difficult does not happen.13

provide many hints that help with the unfamiliar. If

the word scolded on the third line of the right-hand

page gives children trouble, their teacher points out

the information that the context gives them: "Lisa

frowned at the grompet and said, 'Don't be silly!'

What's another word for said that explains she

sounded cross?"

In providing further help for the word scolded, ifneeded, a teacher should help children eliminate

guesses such as "angry talking," or "yelled" by re-minding pupils of what they know about letter-sound

relationships. Pupils have been working with con-

sonants since Level 2, with vowels since Level 3. By

Level 8, most children will be fairly proficient at using

their knowledge of letter-sound relationship cues ...

There you have it. By level 8 the children will be only

fairly proficient in their knowledge of our alphabetic

system, which is taught to them not as an alphabetic system,

but as phonetic cues. Watson Washburn used to refer to

look-say as the look-and-guess method. Is there a more ac-

curate description of this Scott Foresman approach?

The other so-called eclectic basal reading programs are

not much better than the Ginn and Scott Foresman. Andthat is why we still have a mammoth reading problem

throughout our educational system. In this year of 1975,

most American school children are still being SUbjected to

classroom-induced reading disability and dyslexia which

will handicap their intellectual growth for life. One could

have made excuses for this situation in 1955, when no one

knew the causes of the problem and there were virtually no

phonics reading instruction materials available. But today

the market offers the concerned parent as well as the school

system any number of good phonics programs. And yet the

resistance to intensive phonics, emanating mainly from the

professors of education in the teachers' colleges, is what is

making functional illiteracy inevitable for millions of

youngsters. Educational malpractice is so widespread in ourcountry, it makes its medical counterpart pale in com-



Review comments on The New Illiterates: (Arlington House, New Rochelle, N. Y.)

"With chaos in reading in most American schools today, the author's purpose is to turn

parents into 'reading experts.' If you read his incisive, no-jargon information, you will be

one."

Kathy Diehl, The Arizona R epublic

"This book will raise the hackles of educators and parents alike, whatever their back-

grounds, whatever their biases. It deserves a response from the educators, and so do we."

Carmen Fisher, The Boston Globe

"The New Illiterates should be of great interest to anyone concerned about the level of

literacy in America. For parents who would spare their children the agony of a form of

miseducation which can only be described as psychologic torture, this book is essential."

Donald Feder, Libertarian Review

"A lively style makes interesting reading and mothers with pre-schoolers will be particu-

larly interested in the clear instructions on how to teach their children to read at home."

Reference Services Review

"The lay person will find Blumenfeld's book clear and informative (particularly sections

on the history), and it should be very popular."

Library Journal

14



Review comments on How to Tutor: (Arlington House, New Rochelle, N. Y.)

"An excellent book on how to tutor children at home, and thus to prevent educational

disaster before it occurs .... This book should be of value to all parents."

Edith Myers, The Wanderer

"Precise and to the point about tutoring; also not so pedagogic that parents can't grasp the

theories and use the approach with their own children."

American School Board Journal

"This book is a detailed guide for tutors to follow in teaching children the Three R's ....

It is well-organized and presents a logical sequence of instruction in all three general subjects.

It will be a valuable guide book for the inexperienced person who wants to become a part-

time tutor."

Melvin Barger, The Freeman

"Young parents will find this book helpful. Blumenfeld has the capacity to make simple

what originally seems complicated and difficult."

George Schuyler, Manchester Union Leader

"There is an urgent need for such books to be used as guides for parents and tutors. Blu-

menfeld should be commended for his attempt to write what many professionals have failed

to produce in this area."

Forest Benson, Child Study Journal

15



' - 0 J : "\i,' ,"" i . , -e;

.t .r i ' I it ; r ~

lO.J .....

_· P , . ~ . ~l ._ l ,: ' ~ "• .. ( . ' \ , . , " 1 • . · .' I 7_ i. · ·. . ~ . . ~ . ~ . · 'r\ .~?- :~,.,. "•• .."•.•""·...r..•.•..V .

'\'''

- -~1I!'~'~I f . ~ "~ , i~ '~"~.'t: . ! " ' \ : " J 1 " " ; f "~! ....~~.A' i ' i - ,~ "f~' . 1 , ; . ' ' '' 1 " . ~ ''0 .~.~'~~!".l~(.

r ~ ~ , ; .9 v 4 ~ :~ . ~ . r------------------------------------------,

"1 . '!J . ~ · r& :l i ~ \ .. .

{)~:~~>"" , : "

'·.l(I

t . S ·Il1 1 uounrms~"

oJ t~JAAOll1 Iun.

uuu~ .. ' : .:

" - , ', .>• . • .e•.~•. \ : . '. ' ., ' 1 , :. ~ . ' .~ . :. • • . . • . ~ , ~ . ' . ' .( ' _ . ' , ~ , " ' - . ~. • . ~ . ' . ~ ~ , ~ . : . :.•: · ' r . r~~~ :"'\"i . / " : 1 ~ } ; . ' ( ~(l__• .._ ':'! , ," '. ., ~ ~ _ _ .~.J. ~I ... f I. ' /. ." '" ,. ) ~ ~ . ~

()~'l~ x . : ~ ~ J . ~ ; ; ¢ - ~o ' · f , pes n ur ~ r1(~ll~~; ~ j :j/~t\. u o

'i'UJ:;}lS/~S~:~~r01:dqnq(~'[Hur~sr~1·0U UJ:;

Why America Still Has a Reading Problem

Documents

Transcript of Why America Still Has a Reading Problem