Illiteracy has become one of the trendy subjects of television documentaries, news analysis pieces, and feature articles. Hardly any of these, however, addresses the cause of the problem. The reason for the high level of illiteracy in affluent America, where untold billions of dollars have been spent on education, was exposed and conclusively proved by a great man who died earlier this month, Dr. Rudolf Flesch. Even the New York Times identified him in his obituary as “the authority on literacy and clear writing.” Born in Vienna in 1911 and naturalized in America in 1944, with earned doctorates in both countries, Flesch was a prolific writer whose best-selling book titles indicate his expertise with the language. Here are a few samples: “The Art of Plain Talk,” “The Art of Readable Writing,” “The Art of Clear Thinking,” “How to Make Sense,” “How to Write, Speak and Think More Effectively,” “How to be Brief,” “Say What You Mean,” and “How to Write Plain English: A Book for Lawyers and Consumers.”
Having built his career on teaching Americans to write what he called “readable” English, in 1955 he turned his attention to the scandal that the public schools were turning out graduates who could not read well or even read at all. His most important contribution to America was his best-selling book that year called “Why Johnny Can’t Read.”
Flesch told how, starting in the 1930s, the public schools switched from teaching reading in the first grade to teaching word-guessing. Instead of using systematic and intensive phonics to teach children the sounds and syllables of the English language, the schools substituted a guess-at-the-picture, look-and-say system which permitted children to memorize a few dozen or hundred words. Then, readers and textbooks were “dumbed down” to use only those words, adding a few each year. Naturally the stories were boring and repetitious. It’s no wonder that classes became drudgery and lacked challenge.
Upon investigating the schools in my school district in 1955, I discovered that everything Dr. Flesch said was true. Since no school was available in my district that used phonics, I taught all my six children to read at home. This was a couple of decades before the Wall Street Journal discovered this month that homeschoolers by the hundreds of thousands are doing a better job than the public schools.
Twenty-five years after that landmark book, Rudolf Flesch again surveyed the public schools and found that 85 percent are still refusing to teach phonics to first-graders, and are trying to disguise their failure by pretending to teach phonics. His 1981 book on this subject was called “Why Johnny Still Can’t Read: A New Look at the Scandal of Our Schools.”
One survey after another has confirmed the tragedy that 60 million Americans, the majority of those who attended public schools during the last 30 years, can at best read at only marginal levels, if at all. That means, for example, that they cannot read large-print poison warnings, or road signs, or menus in fast-food restaurants, much less the Help Wanted sections in the newspapers. They can’t read the antidote instructions on a can of Drano if a child swallows it.
The reason these people can’t read, according to Rudolf Flesch, is that they were never taught how. Instead, they were taught to memorize the shapes and meanings of a few words and to skip over the short words whose shapes are not distinct enough to remember. Children whose memory skills can’t cope with such inefficiency and impreciseness are misdiagnosed as having a learning disability, dyslexia, minimal brain damage, or “attention deficit disorder.”
In the last article written by Dr. Flesch before he died, he said that, when he published the truth about reading, “Naively, I thought the schools would see the error of their ways and go back to phonics. But they didn’t. Instead, they attacked me bitterly and persisted in teaching look-and-say.”
What is the explanation for the education establishment’s massive resistance to phonics in the face of the fact that more than 100 scientific studies prove the superiority of phonics to the look-say method? Perhaps it is commercial and self-serving. A dozen textbook publishers make hundreds of millions of dollars out of look-say readers, with workbooks, flashcards, and other classroom paraphernalia. A whole pseudo-science has grown up around the anti-phonics International Reading Association, with speakers, journals, workshops, and conventions where they grind out an endless flow of paper, develop remedial courses and “special education classes,” and convene to urge hiring more and more tax-paid personnel to service the problems they have created.
Dr. Flesch died optimistic, believing that “sooner or later common sense will return and our children will again be taught to read.” His legacy offers the solution to illiteracy; we hope America will soon take the cure.
