Dyslexia & Reading Problems

Developmental dyslexia is a condition related to poor reading. Children with dyslexia have difficulty learning to read due to one or more information processing problems such as visual perceptual or auditory perceptual deficits. Many but not all children with dyslexia have difficulty with reversals of numbers, letters or words. New research points the way to specific methods of instruction that can help anyone learn to read well no matter what the underlying problem may be. Following the links will provide interesting new information as well as extremely effective solutions for all types of reading problems including developmental dyslexia.


What is dyslexia?
Children who have an average or above IQ and are reading 1 1/2 grades or more below grade level may be dyslexic. True dyslexia affects about 3 to 6 percent of the population yet in some parts of the country up to 50% of the students are not reading at grade level. This means that the reason for most children not reading at grade level is ineffective reading instruction. The dyslexic child often suffers from having a specific learning disability as well as being exposed to ineffective instruction.

Children may have dyslexia or a learning disability if they have one or more of the following symptoms:
• Letter or word reversals when reading. (Such as was/saw, b/d, p/q).
• Letter or word reversals when writing.
• Difficulty repeating what is said to them.
• Poor handwriting or printing ability.
• Poor drawing ability.
• Reversing letters or words when spelling words that are presented orally.
• Difficulty comprehending written or spoken directions.
• Difficulty with right - left directionality.
• Difficulty understanding or remembering what is said to them.
• Difficulty understanding or remembering what they have just read.
• Difficulty putting their thoughts on paper.

Children with dyslexia do not exhibit these symptoms due to poor vision or hearing but because of brain dysfunction. The eyes and ears are working properly but the lower centers of the brain scramble the images or sounds before they reach the higher (more intelligent) centers of the brain. This causes confusion as well as frustration for the learner.

When a child is having difficulty learning, a comprehensive neurodevelopmental exam is important. This includes testing of hearing, vision, neurological development, coordination, visual perception, auditory perception, intelligence, and academic achievement.

Often, perception problems can be helped with simple exercises which either help to improve a specific problem or teach techniques to compensate for a problem. These often can be done at home. In a few cases, a referral to an educational or speech therapist may be helpful.

A Word of Caution

Care must be exercised in using the N.I.M. method that you do not try to push your child beyond his intelligence expectancy grade level. For example, if a child has approximately 100 I.Q. and is in the fifth grade, it could be assumed that he would read up to the fifth grade level. Many times this grade level can be achieved within about 8 to 12 hours of the N.I.M. if the child has started at the third grade level. If you continue on with the N.I.M. after expectancy has been achieved, very little additional gain is to be expected. However, if you wish to spend a few hours of instructional time experimenting to make certain the child has reached his optimum level, this may be well justified. It will not harm the child if you are sure not to press for results beyond his capacity.





Make It an Adventure!

The attitude of the parent is going to make or break the success of the reading sessions. Your approach should be cheerful not business like. For example, "Okay, we are going to read for 15 minutes. I've been looking forward to it all day." Tune out any negative signals you may receive from the child. Simply get out the materials, sit down on the couch, and pat the place next to you where you wish the child to sit. The sessions are so short and so undemanding, we can promise that the child will cooperate, especially when he begins to notice signs of improvement in his reading-and he will notice.

Don't stint on praise-but keep it honest. A pat on the head accompanied by, "Wow! You were great today," will do much to keep the level of enthusiasm high.

Do not allow any interruptions. This is your time with the child for a specific purpose and he is not going to take it seriously if you bound up to take a telephone call or answer the door. Have another adult or a sibling posted to run interference during these important fifteen minutes.
Scheduling the reading session at the same time and in the same place every day helps not only to bring organization and structure to the commitment but also places a value on it. "This is the time when Johnny and I read together but I can see you in fifteen minutes."

It should be carefully noted that not every parent is capable of working with his child on an academic level. Very simply, some parents work extremely well with their children-others find it a frustrating, exasperating experience. If you are one of the latter, waste no time on feelings of guilt, we cannot all be all things to our children. (You're probably terrific in a number of other parent-child activities.)

Parents who can work well with their children and who want to help in the academic situation often don't know what to do or how to do it. Happily, the Neurological Impress Method of Reading is one thing a parent can do with confidence and with every chance of success.

Helping Your Child At HomeWith The Neurological Impress Method of Reading

by http://www.childdevelopmentinfo.com/

If you are a parent who enjoys working with your child, who finds that time spent together in academic pursuits is productive and rewarding, and if your child needs reinforcement in the area of reading, then you may wish to consider the Neurological Impress Method (N.I.M.) devised by R.G. Heckelman, PhD. This method has proved so successful it has been used by thousands of parents throughout North America. The reason for N.I.M.'s success is that it truly combines seeing/ hearing/speaking for simultaneous learning.

It is a particularly effective home method because no special training is required and the cost involved is negligible. All you need is reading material at the proper level for your child. Dr. Heckelman recommends 2-3 grade levels below the child's actual grade level. The material can be borrowed from the school or checked out at the local library.

Don't be misled by the simplicity of the N.I.M,. it works! And, it is particularly effective in the one-to-one setting of parent and child. Only fifteen minutes a day (on consecutive days) for a period of eight to twelve hours is required. Generally, positive results will occur at about the fourth hour of instruction. (If no gains have been noted by this time, there may be other interfering difficulties that are limiting the child's progress with N.I.M.)

Seat the child slightly in front of you so that your voice is close to the child's ear. Dr. Heckelman recommends that the parent sit on the right side of the child.




From the very first session, you and the child will read the same material out loud together. It is generally advisable in the beginning sessions that you read a little louder and slightly faster than the child is reading. Initially, the child may complain that he cannot keep up with you but urge him to continue and ignore any mistakes he may be making. An alternative is to slow down slightly to a more comfortable speed for the youngster. By re-reading lines or paragraphs several times together before going on to more reading material, this discomfort on the part of the child is quickly overcome. You will find that you and he will establish a comfortable rhythm in a very short time. In most cases, only two or three minutes of repetition is sufficient.

Very little preliminary instruction is necessary before the reading begins. The child is told not to think of reading since we are training him to slide his eyes across the paper. At no time is his reading corrected. As you and the child read together, move your finger simultaneously under the spoken words in a smooth continuous fashion at precisely the same speed and flow as the verbal reading. This gives the child a clear target, keeps his eyes from straying all over the page, and helps establish left-right progression.

If desired, the child may later take over the finger function. If he experiences difficulty, reach out and place your hand on his finger and guide it to a smooth flowing movement. Pay particular attention to the end of a line where the finger should move rapidly back to where the new line begins. It is common for people not to move their fingers back rapidly enough (something like a typewriter carriage returning to position at the end of a line).

Be sure that your voice and fingers are synchronized. Very good readers tend to look ahead and run their finger ahead of where their voice is. In using the N.I.M., it is absolutely essential that the finger movements, voice, and words all be synchronized.

Not only should you never correct the child's misreading of words, but at no time during the session should you stop and ask questions about word recognition or comprehension. The major concern is with style of reading rather than accuracy.

Usually, by the time it is apparent that a child needs some remedial reading, he has accumulated a number of poor reading habits and eye movements and has lost confidence, all of which produce inefficient reading pattern. He is apt to read word by word, and often that is accompanied by body rocking back and forth as he tries to force recognition and comprehension of each word as it comes along. One of the most important aspects of the N.I.M., as far as you are concerned, is to forget conventional reading approaches you may have heard of and think more in terms of exposing your child to a correct reading process.

Even after the child's reading has speeded up considerably, word recognition will probably improve somewhat more slowly. Word recognition lags behind the functional reading process by a year to a year and a half. Not to worry! Once your child has begun to read in newspapers and magazines at home voluntarily and has gained confidence in this new skill, he will make rapid strides in word recognition.

"Pacing" is another extremely important aspect of the N.I.M. Pacing means that the material should be periodically speeded up, and the youngster is literally dragged to higher rates of speed in the reading process. This is done only for a few minutes at a time, but probably should become a part of every reading session.

The material used is of extreme importance to the success of the N.I.M. As mentioned earlier, it is suggested that the child be started on material that is two to three grade levels below the child's actual grade level. But care must be taken not to spend too much time at the lower levels of the child's reading ability. Over-exposure to difficult words is far more important than under-exposure.One of the reasons for the success of the N.I.M. seems to be the enormous exposure readers have to words. An ordinary session of N.I.M. reading, for fifteen minutes, will run as high as 2000 words! It is not at all uncommon in elementary-level books to range from 10 to 20 pages of reading material in one session. Too little exposure is more detrimental than too much. There have been no instances reported where tremendous amounts of exposure to material have been harmful to any child.

10 Years Of Brain Imaging Research Shows The Brain Reads Sound By Sound

by www.childdevelopmentinfo.com

A dyslexia research team at Yale University's Center for Learning and Attention lead by Dr. Sally Shaywitz has found a window on the brain through a new imaging technique called functional MRI. These medical scientists have identified parts of the brain used in reading. By observing the flow of oxygen-rich blood to working brain cells, they have found that people who know how to sound out words can rapidly process what they see. This information has shed new light on dyslexia and how to help dyslexics.

When readers are asked to imagine "cat" without the "kah" sound, they readily summon "at." The MRI photographs show their brains lighting up like pinball machines. When the brain gets it, the light bulbs really do go on. However, the brains of people who can't sound out words often look different on MRI pictures. There is less blood flow to the language centers of the brain and, in some cases, not much activity evident at all. Scientist's are not sure why this is or what it means. But simply put, without the ability to sound out words, the brain is stumped.

Basically this research seems to be saying that the brain learns to read the same way it learns to talk, one sound at a time. When babies first learn to talk they may slowly say one sound at a time. Once they get the hang of it, they speed up. Our brain becomes adept at processing and our experience is that of hearing words but actually our brain is processing sounds (phonemes) and putting them together so we hear words. When we read the same process is in operation. Our brain is processing one sound at a time but we perceive it as a whole word. In good readers, the process is so fast it appears that they are reading whole words but in fact they are converting the letters on the written page into to sounds. The brain then recognizes groups of sounds as words.

Reading is not automatic but must be learned. The reader must develop a conscious awareness that the letters on the page represent the sounds of the spoken word. To read the word "cat," the reader must parse, or segment, the word into its underlying phonological elements. Once the word is in its phonological form, it can be identified and understood. In dyslexia, an inefficient phonological module produces representations that are less clear and, hence, more difficult to bring to awareness.

According to Dr. Shaywitz, "Over the past two decades, a coherent model of dyslexia has emerged that is based on phonological processing. The phonological model is consistent both with the clinical symptoms of dyslexia and with what neuroscientists know about brain organization and function. Investigators from many laboratories, including my colleagues and I at the Yale Center, have had the opportunity through 10 years of cognitive, and more recently, neurobiological studies."

Dyslexics (or poor readers) are very frustrated by the fact that they can understand what they hear but not what they read. Dyslexics have average or above average intelligence. Once they can properly decode words they can understand the concept. Decoding skills are the key to learning from written material.Years of educational research has shown that the use of intensive phonics is the only way to teach dyslexics and learning disabled individuals how to read. The new brain research shows why intensive phonics is also the best way for everyone to learn to read.

Raising Children Who Love to Read

By Carol Boles

If you’re wondering why some children grow up to become successful readers and possess a love for reading, the answer is simple. Their parents have made a commitment to their reading development.




Children can begin a journey to reading success and enjoyment when parents commit to:

• reading to children as young as six months old. Begin reading when they are barely sitting up and their eyes are beginning to focus. Select simple, colorful board books and read them aloud with expression. Point to pictures, identify characters or animals and talk about the story.
  
• a schedule for reading aloud until children are independent readers. Modeling good reading allows children to hear reading that is fluid and full of expression. Parents should allow children to select books as well as select books themselves. When parents introduce new books this helps children develop a sense of the kinds of books they like.
  
• to making visits to the library until children are old enough to go there on their own. Show children visiting the library will become a part of their lives. Help them choose books to read or have read aloud. If children are older talk about the books they’ve chosen. Parents should select books themselves and talk about what they’re reading as well.
  
• to taking their children to books stores in their strollers, through the elementary, middle and high school years. Buy them a drink or snack, and browse the colorful displays and shelves full of books. Both parents and children should leave with a book.
  
• to reading themselves. Children naturally emulate their parent’s behavior. When parents possess a love for reading their children usually do as well. Parent should always have a novel they’re reading and set aside time for “read ins” with their children.

When parents commit to their children’s reading education this nurtures reading development and an enjoyment of books. And, all the while those parents have had a great time enjoying great books themselves.

Learning To Read Should Be As Easy As Learning To Talk

Just watch how a preschooler will pretend to read a story you have just read for them. They are learning by imitation. Actually that is how children learn many things. Take speech for an example. Young children learn to talk by imitating the sounds made by their parents. They then learn how the sounds go together to make words.




When you helped your child learn to talk you both had fun. You probably made up games to stimulate them to talk. They interacted with you and that made the learning process enjoyable. You both smiled and laughed when they learned to say new words or phrases.

Reading and writing are simply talking on paper. Why shouldn’t learning to read be just as much fun as learning to talk? Here are some tips for encouraging your child to enjoy reading:

• Read to your child. No matter what age your child happens to be, he will benefit from listening to you read aloud.
  
• Discuss the books you read to your child.
  
• Be a good reading "model" by letting your child see you read.
  
• Introduce your child to books that discuss his hobby, interests, or new experiences.
  
• Buy books as presents for your child and he’ll learn to value books.
  
• Make sure your child has a library card.

Poor Reading Affects Many Children

A recent survey showed that 44% of the 4th Grade children nation wide are not able to read at or above the basic, or partial mastery, level on the 1994 National Assessment of Education Progress test. The extent of the problem ranged from 27% in Maine to 62% in Louisiana. In California 59% of the students are reading BELOW the minimum established proficiency level for reading.




Children with poor reading skills often:

• Receive poor grades
  
• Are easily frustrated
  
• Have difficulty completing assignments
  
• Have low self-esteem
  
• Have behavior problems
  
• Have more physical illnesses due to stress
  
• Don't like school
  
• Grow up to be shy in front of groups Fail to develop to their full potential

from http://www.childdevelopmentinfo.com/

Home Schooling - An Alternative To Public "Education"

It is becoming clearly obvious to many parents that something is very wrong with the public education system. Each year fewer students graduate with sufficient academic and cognitive skills, violence and immorality continue to rise, and this continues unabated despite never-ending mammoth funding to the local and federal Departments of Education by the government. The reasons for this are simple to understand. Primarily psychiatrists and behavioral psychologists now run the schools. Behaviorism views man as an animal, to be manipulated and controlled within planned environments. The modern public school system represents the psycholgists attempts to create a "planned environment" which will act upon the student, modify thier ideas, beliefs, and values, and thereby alter their behavior (to bring about a new and different society). Instead of academics aimed at increasing the individuality and self-determinism of the student, we now have behavioral engineering and psychotherapy aimed at "feelings" and the "socialization" of the child.




The key person behind all this as relates to modern education was John Dewey., professor of philosophy and psychology at Columbia Teachers College. Wilhelm Wundt, a German experimental psychologist, began the shift of concern from man's "mind" or "soul" to raw animal behavior. Philosophically, the tendency of all modern psychology since has been to deny and eradicate the human mind and all it does, and instead forward and promote the notion of Man as another animal, as just another part of Nature, and subject to scientiific laws of stimulus-response and genetic evolution. This is why modern public education is a disaster.

Outcome-based-education (OBE) is largely the product of the major "learning labs" and foundations which employ only psychologists and behavioral engineers. It is all about social manipulation, planning and bring about a "new planned society", and very little about what we all assume education to be - learning to read, write, arithmetic (logic) and develop intellectual, cognitive and academic skills. OBE has the support of funding and legislation in almost if not all states. It's not going away. A large, dedicated, influencial, and very well-funded group of folks intend to use the public education system as their means of modifying the beliefs and behavior of the coming generation.

A study of the history of public education makes it clear that it has always been viewed with "social" agenda in mind above all else. See what Frederick Taylor Gates, of the General Education Board, back in the late 1800s had to say about the purpose of public education - it wasn't to bring out the best of each and every person.

Modern public education represents almost 100 years of intensive planning, funding and behind the scenes controlling by the National Education Assocation (NEA), wealthy individuals and philanthropic foundations, and various humanist organizations. The common link to these all has been the infuence or support of psychiatry, behavioral psychology, cultural anthropoly and sociology - the social sciences. And the aim of these is simply to use "science" to control and birng about a new world order (as they, the elite materialistic "authorities" conceive this to be). The goal is a "social concept", a "State" view, and not improving or bringing out the best of any individual child.

Every school and teacher has been educated into the modern psychiatric views of labeling childen with various "mental disorders" such as "learning disabled", "minimal brain dysfunction", "dyslexia" and "Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder", the "solution" for all of which is DRUGS. Ironically, many of the students who display these problems often got them in the first lace because of faulty education in vasic reading skills. Phonics, which has been a successful method for teaching reading to children for over a century, has been completley run our of the schools by psychologists, and replaced with ineffective "whole-language" and "look-say" methods, which act to cripple the child's vocabulary and their entire furute ability to read or learn anything.

If you want your child to be educated into academics, with a sense of right and wrong, responsibility and decency, the only solution is to get out of and away from federally funded public education. private schools are one alternative and home schooling is another.
Many parents are finding both success and incredible personal rewards following the home schooling approach. Many parents initially respond, "How can I find the time? How can we afford to home school our children?" A better way to put it is:

How can you afford NOT to ensure your children obtain a quality education including academics, values and responsibility?Check out the links below for more information on the modern public education system, it's relationships to modern psychology and psychiatry, home schooling resources, and home schooling reading materials. As the government has failed to act responsibly for the eductaion of the future generation, this leaves only you and me as the only people who can and will do it.

Reading without Tours 2

by Charles J. Sykes

Chall defined it as a philosophy that emphasizes the "qualities and values of love, care, and concern for children." In the 1920s, reformers insisted that children should be taught to read for meaning from the very start, without rote learning; that they be liberated from the stultifyingly dull and dreary training in phonics and freed for a lifetime of creativity. The earlier child-centered advocates insisted that if they were given interesting stories, children would learn to read with greater comprehension, even if there was little or no teaching of the forms and sounds of letters and words. "Although the research of the past eighty years has refuted those claims," Chall noted, "they persist. If they are relinquished for a period, they return as new discoveries, under new labels."

Chall attributed the resiliency of such ideas to the desire of Americans to avoid pain, hard work, and discomfort, and to shield the tender sensibilities of the young from the rigors of a demanding curriculum. Learning basics can be hard and might entail both effort and disappointment. But basics also imply a set of standards outside of the child himself, a standard that is uncompromising and to which the child must accommodate himself. This, of course, is anathema to the democratic, child-centered classroom. Chall's analysis is worth quoting at some length:

"Why do these concepts of reading return again and again? Why are they so persistent?" the Harvard professor asked. "I propose that they are deep in our American culture and therefore difficult to change. These conceptions promise quick and easy solution to real learning-reading without tears, reading full of joy. They are the magic bullet that is offered as a solution to the serious reading problems of our times. Further, phonics requires knowledge, effort, and work. The whole or whole language way has always promised more joy, more fun, and less work for the child and for the teacher."

Since the whole language movement claims that beginning reading is not conceptually different than any other kind of reading, "teachers are required to know less than for a developmental view of teaching." Underlying the whole language approach, Chall wrote, is the belief that "a good heart goes a long way, and the less teaching the better. It fears structure more than no learning.... It flees from the idea that there might be 'basics' to be learned first." Such an attitude is "imbued with love and hope," according to Chall. "But sadly, it has proven to be less effective than a developmental view, and least effective for those who tend to be at risk for learning to read - low-income, minority children and those at risk for learning disability."

Reading without Tours 1

by Charles J. Sykes

There is, in fact, nothing terribly new about either the techniques or the issues in the debates over reading in the nation's schools. Jeanne Chall, a professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, remarks that the current debates tend to echo similar arguments made in the 1920s. While the issues were similar, she found that the professional literature of the 1920s and 1930s was much more reasoned, even though there was "infinitely less research and theory on which to base the reasoning," than that in the 1990s. "In contrast," she wrote, "the reading literature of the 1980s and early 1990s uses stronger rhetoric and seems to base its positions more on ideology than on the available scientific and theoretical literature.

The key to understanding what researchers have found is to recognize that grown-ups read differently than small children do. This should be painfully obvious; indeed, one needs to be a certified educationist not to see it. But Chall notes that whole language advocates continue to "view beginning and later reading as essentially the same." They have taken Cattell's error and turned it into practice. It has taken the accumulated research of nearly eighty years to establish that while "beginning reading may look the same as mature reading," it is, in fact, "quite different." Reading is always about understanding the meaning of words, Chall wrote, but beginning reading relies heavily on the ability to sound out words phonetically. "As reading develops, it has more to do with language and reasoning." Whole language advocates argue that learning how to read comes naturally and does not need to be taught. But, according to Chall, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that "a beginning reading program that does not give children knowledge and skill in recognizing and decoding words will have poor results."

So what is the dispute all about? Why aren't the schools rushing to implement programs that demonstrably work and chucking out those schemes that have been so badly discredited? Why are educationists, who want so desperately to be thought of as real academics and scientists, so reluctant to base their methods on actual research? The answer, Chall said, lies in the "more powerful forces at work - values, ideologies, philosophies, and appealing rhetoric." Since the 1920s, when child-centered theories began to dominate the schools, the vision of education embodied in whole language has dominated educational thinking. "For a growing number," wrote Chall, "it means a philosophy of education and of life, not merely a method of teaching reading."

The Attack on Phonics

by Charles J. Sykes

While local superintendents and school principals are often at pains to assure concerned parents that their reading programs include some element of phonics, the leaders of the whole language movement make no secret of their contempt for phonics. Kenneth Goodman insisted that "direct instruction in phonics is neither necessary nor desirable to produce readers." But their hostility runs much deeper. Critics who push for a phonic-based teaching are often derided as members of the Christian Right or educational simpletons.

Harvey Daniels, the director of the Center for City Schools, dismissed phonics as "the only approach to reading that removes meaning from reading."" Another advocate explained that "Phonics has to do with sound. Reading has to do with meaning." The implication is that children who read phonetically may be able to decode and pronounce the words they read, but won't know what they mean - a charge that is frequently made by critics of phonics, who seldom bother to offer much evidence to support the contention. While deriding phonics as a form of dry, soulless "rote" learning, advocates of whole language claim that their approach differs from traditional practices because of its use of "authentic" literature in the classroom. Parents and school boards are often induced to buy into whole language approaches by the claim that the program will introduce children to literary works, in contrast to programs that rely on memorization and "drilling" in letter sounds. But the use of literature is hardly an innovation - literature has always been a part of reading instruction, except during those years when it was replaced by "age appropriate" readers dumbed down to the "See Dick Run" level of inanity. Both McGuffey's reader and Noah Webster's spelling book relied on literature to teach reading. Students in nineteenth century elementary classrooms could expect to read Lewis Carroll, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Daniel Webster, William Shakespeare, John Bunyan, George Washington, Sir Walter Scott, and Henry Thoreau, among others. As one critic noted, "Those children were not any smarter than the ones today. They just read better because they were taught properly.""

The March of Folly 2

by Charles J. Sykes

In the late 1950s, "language experience" was discredited in the collapse of "life adjustment" education, but its impulses toward a more democratic, humanistic classroom have proven impervious to failure, rejection, and miserable test scores. Indeed, the movement that was a rollicking bust in the 1950s is reemerging as an educational innovation and "reform" in the 1990s. Moreover, it is spreading without any research or evidence to show that it works. Its foremost advocates take the lack of such research as a badge of honor. "So dynamic is the whole language movement," Kenneth Goodman crowed in 1989, "that innovative practice is leaping ahead of research and rapidly expanding and explicating the fine points of theory." In other words, educationists are adopting whole language programs without waiting for any indication that they work and insist that the lack of research to support what they are doing is not a sign of recklessness or wishful thinking, but rather an indication of their dynamism.

What they lack in terms of evidence, whole language advocates make up for with their enthusiasm. Whole language, writes one devotee, is not merely a way of teaching kids to read, it is "a spirit, a philosophy, a movement. . . " with students "who have become eager and joyful readers and writers . . ." How can mere literacy compete with joyful reading? Another describes whole language as "a way of thinking, a way of living and learning with children." It involves "teachers who even outside their classrooms, are activists and advocates for children, for themselves, and for their curriculum." So what if children can't spell, when they can experience the "great authenticity of life"?

Wrote one educationist: "To empower learners, whole language teachers do not select all the books to read ... correct students' nonstandard forms at the point of production, spell on demand, or revise and edit for students." Thus, the teacher's abdication of responsibility and the semiliterate, ungrammatical, misspelled, run-on sentences he or she tolerates are transmuted into "empowerment," as if a child is made stronger through uncorrected mediocrity. The resulting mass of junk writing is justified on the grounds that students should not be "bound to someone else's standards of perfection." A whole language devotee argues that the child needs to be liberated from "an uptight, must-be-right model of literacy." Thus far, the liberation has proceeded apace, with only pockets of resistance. "Whole language" appears to have an iron lock on schools of teacher education, academic journals, and much of the education bureaucracy. Support for whole language is so uniform among professors of teacher education that many newly minted teachers have never been taught anything else. Critiques or negative reviews occasionally appear in educational journals, but they are rare and usually drowned out by a chorus of praise.

Professor Patrick Groff noted that over a recent five-year period, the journal Reading Teacher published 119 laudatory articles on whole language and only a single piece that referred to possible shortcomings. State education departments have been particularly susceptible to whole language programs and many have incorporated them into state guidelines - most dramatically in California. In addition, Groff noted, whole language "holds out the lure to teachers that they alone will become the judges of how well their pupils have learned to read. This totally unassailable exemption from accountability by teachers to parents and any other parties, is called 'teacher empowerment'" by advocates of whole language.

Not surprisingly, whole language advocates are decidedly cool to the suggestions that student reading or writing should be measured through tests. "As scores become important," sniffs one whole languagist, "students become invisible." Given the results of such theories in actual practice, her attitude toward instruments of accountability and measurement is understandable. Whole language teachers, she says, prefer "alternative" methods of judging how well a child reads. Rather than "narrowly conceived tests," they much prefer portfolios of written work, along with "pictures, anecdotes, and tapes." All of which, undoubtedly, are wonderful. The point, of course, is that whole language advocates insist that there are no solid measurements of ability because there are no fast and firm standards.

The March of Folly

by Charles J. Sykes

In the late nineteenth century, a proto-educationist named James Cattell journeyed to Leipzig to study the psychology of learning. Cattell was later to found Columbia University's department of psychology and to train some of the most influential American educationists of the century. Most importantly, he provided a scientific gloss to the abandonment of traditional methods of teaching reading. Through a series of experiments, Cattell found that adults who knew how to read can recognize words without sounding out letters. From that, he drew the conclusion that words aren't sounded out, but are seen as "total word pictures." If competent readers did not need to sound out words, he declared, then there was little point in teaching such skills to children. "The result," wrote Lance J. Klass in The Leipzig Connection, "was the dropping of the phonic or alphabetic method of teaching reading, and its replacement by the sight-reading method in use throughout America."

As many of his successors would do, Cattell confused the "attributes" of readers (or in later edspeak, "the expected behaviors" or "outcomes") with the appropriate way of acquiring those attributes. Of course, skilled readers did not stop to sound out words; long practice had made that unnecessary. It was thus an "outcome" of learning to read; the mechanics of reading, including the ability to sound out words, enabled the reader to achieve that outcome. But since the actual process of sounding out words is not the desired "outcome," educationists decided that they could dispense with it.

The consequences of buying this argument included, as Richard Mitchell gibes, "not only the stupefaction of almost the whole of American culture but even the birth and colossal growth of a lucrative industry devoted first to assuring children won't be able to read and then to selling an endless succession of 'remedies' for that inability."

Looking back at the growth of the "whole language movement," University of Illinois professor P. David Pearson remarked that during the past two and half decades, he had seen succeeding waves of "movement, fads and panaceas," from open classrooms to mastery learning. "But," he mused, "never have I witnessed anything like the rapid spread of the whole-language movement. Pick your metaphor - an epidemic, wildfire, manna from heaven - whole language has spread so rapidly throughout North America that it is a fact of life in literacy curriculum and research." If Pearson is exaggerating, it is only insofar as he sees "whole language" as a relatively recent development. In fact, it is a reworking of ideas that have been fashionable for seven decades or more under a variety of names, titles, and sales pitches.

Yetta Goodman - who, along with her husband Kenneth, is a leading guru of 'whole language" - acknowledges that it is an extension of child-centered and progressive educational ideas in vogue in John Dewey's time. She also acknowledges that "whole language" differs little in substance from what was known in the 1940s and 1950s as "language experience." She describes whole language as an educational philosophy that focuses "not on the content of what is being learned, but on the learner.... The teacher is viewed as a co-learner with the students. The environment is a democratic one . . . [emphasis added]

In "language experience," educators of the 1950s emphasized a holistic approach to teaching - what was then known as the "all around development of the child." Rather than simply reading books, the mavens of Life Adjustment and "language experience" involved students in group activities, excursions, discussions, storytelling, drama, music, and art. From all of these "experiences," children were supposed to produce "charts, lists, menus, plans, magazines, newsletters," and other "reading materials." Yetta Goodman acknowledges the obvious: "There is much in whole language that is similar to language experience and, indeed, many whole language educators, including me, were initially advocates of language experience." The architects of "language experience" believed that traditional divisions of subject matters into different disciplines were obsolete and advocated turning the schools into places in which children could be made "fully functional and self-actualizing individuals" through "collaborative group settings."

Hole Langwidg

by Charles J. Sykes

At first blush, the arguments for "whole language" seem self-evident, which accounts, in part, for their widespread acceptance. Advocates argue that teachers should emphasize comprehension and immerse children in high-quality literature. They insist they are teaching literacy by reading interesting and stimulating stories and undertaking projects that interest and involve children and reduce their anxieties about reading and writing. But in its purer forms, "whole language" is not merely an instructional technique, it is an overarching philosophy of education. its advocates believe that children learn "naturally, " that children learn best when "learning is kept whole, meaningful, interesting and functional," and that this is more likely to happen when children make their own choices as part of a "community of learners" in a noncompetitive environment. "Whole language" advocates describe "optimal literacy environments," which they say "promote risk taking and trust." These classrooms are "child-centered," and children learn at their own pace.




Very few students have "anxiety" or "stress" about reading if they are simply properly taught how to read. Due to the incredible failure of modern education to teach basic reading skills, numerous students are labeled "learning disabled" or "dyslexic", and then to add injury to insult, are forced to take strong psychotropic drugs to "cure" their supposed "mental disorders". The psych industry first creates many of the problems by failing to teach simple basic reading skills, then falsely diagnoses these study problems as "mental disorders", and then the psych industry profits more by drugging the poor child. This is an extreme betrayal to the children of America (and anywhere else where this is occurring).

Not surprisingly, this is not a place where drills in phonics or an emphasis on the mechanics of reading is likely to be stressed. Nor is there much room for stressing that there are right and wrong ways of spelling or writing in this brave new world in which children monitor themselves, take chances, express their feelings, and look at pictures in books. Whole language, riffs one enthusiast, is "child-centered, experiential, reflective, authentic, holistic, social, collaborative, democratic, cognitive, developmental, constructivist, and challenging." The more zealous advocates of this learner-centered, child-centered approach seem to believe that teaching basic skills is not only unnecessary, but could be positively harmful to the blooming creativity and self-esteem of young children. Putting too much pressure on children to learn the phonetic rules might get in the way of the child's enthusiasm, his wonder, exploration and his eagerness to sing beautiful songs from his unsullied soul. Rather than seeing such basic skills as providing children a key to unlock the secrets of literacy, they see such skills as anchors preventing children from continuing to trail clouds of glory.

Educationists, of course, insist that this romantic view of learning has a solid basis in "science." The history of this movement can, in part, be traced to the attempts of fledgling educationists to win some legitimacy for their field.

Nowhere is the child told to "sound it out."

by Charles J. Sykes

The child is actually taught to "look at the pictures" to understand the story. What happens later when he tries to read books without pictures? Obviously, he fails at reading. The students are encouraged to ask other students for "help" because "learning" is a "group experience". Again, how does this actually improve his reading skills? It doesn't, but the teacher rewards the student with effusive compliments for being "responsible and asking other students for help" and the student "feels good" - he's had a "positive learning experience", but he still can't read! Part of the whole-language approach involves happily going by words one doesn't understand, and trying to "figure the words out" by noticing the context from the earlier and later part of the sentence and story.

The simply solution, and the best skill to teach any student is "look up the word in a dictionary". Words have exact "meanings", but not to the modern "professional educators". To them, "meaning is different for everybody" and it's quite okay for a student to think of the word "horse" to mean "mule", a picture of a car to be a "truck" and so on. Since the student's experience is defined by how they feel about their "learning process", there is no care or attention placed on "objective meaning" of words. Education Alive, a group concerned with improving study skills, has prepared a great book on how to learn to use a dictionary. Any student would benefit greatly by using this book to learn study skills which help them develop an ever-expanding vocabulary.

Words relate to the world of things, and life itself. If a student is robbed of the chance to have a good understanding of a large quantity of words he will be at a disadvantage in anything he does - plus he won't have any skills to learn additional words in the future. The goal of public education never was to educate people. See the actual goal of public education in the words of their own founders.

Oklahoma's educrats took a similar approach in setting out their reading "outcomes" for second graders. The statewide guidelines called on second graders to "use fix-it strategies in order to continue reading." What exactly did the educationists have in mind for kids who are unable to figure out a word? Their suggestions included: "ask a friend, skip the word, substitute another meaningful word."" (Ask a teacher? Sound it out? Apparently not.)

A publication of the Wisconsin Public Department of Public Instruction warns parents explicitly not to tell their children to "sound out" unfamiliar words, "because sounding is only part of the game." ("Reading is not just sounding out words,"' the educrats explained with the usual mix of the obvious and the jargonesque. "Reading is the process of constructing meaning through the dynamic interaction between the reader, the book, and the reading/leaming situation." [more "situation" = experience nonsense from Dewey] Look at the pictures. Skip the word. Ask a friend. Is this reading? Wittig and Jankowski found that in their children's schools, "repetitious and predictable" books were used in reading classes. "Children memorize the text as they 'read' the story over and over with the teacher." "It is our experience that they cannot read new books until the text has been memorized."

But is memorization the same as reading? [Again, to the modern educator it is more important that the student learn to conform to group rules and procedures, than actually learn to read - and conforming to group goals takes precedence over all aspects of what most of us think of as valid learning] When they pressed the teachers about this, the two mothers said, "We are told that reading should be a pleasant experience, not distressful." [The goal is for the student to be rewarded for operating well within a group, y receiving "positive experiences". Every common sense educational idea is thrown overboard if it blocks the way for the student from having "meaningful, positive and rewarding classroom experiences. This is crazy! Welcome to modern education!]

How Kids Learn 2

by Charles J. Sykes

Phonics advocates also point to trends in reading scores over the last few decades. If phonics really is effective, then reading test scores should go up when it is used more heavily and should decline when it is de-emphasized. In fact, it is possible to test such a hypothesis. Phonics made a temporary resurgence in the early 1970s, when beginning reading programs once again emphasized the mechanics of reading and sounding out words. By the 1980s, however, educationists had turned to "whole language" approaches and phonics once again fell into relative disuse. During that two-decade period, the National Assessment of Educational Progress conducted six national assessments of reading abilities. The NAEP found that during the 1970s, nine-year-olds showed a steady improvement in reading comprehension. But in the 1980s, the rise in reading scores stopped. Although reading scores in 1988 were higher than in 1971, the NAEP concluded, "this progress was made during the 1970s." Thus the reading scores of fourth graders rose during a decade when they had been exposed as first and second graders to basic phonics programs. As phonics programs were dropped, the improvements dropped off.




The early start on phonics also appears to have long-term consequences. In 1988, the NAEP found that the reading scores of seventeen-year-olds who had learned to read phonetically in the 1970s - showed improvement. The NAEP explained the relative success of those students as "due, at least, in part, to an early advantage" in their reading scores in the 1970s. While urging caution about drawing too sweeping a conclusion from such trends, Harvard Education professor Jeanne Chall noted that "there is considerable evidence that methods and materials and other school factors do make a difference in students' reading achievement ... we may indeed find that the beginning reading programs in the 1980s-programs that put a greater emphasis on - 'whole language' - may be related to the declines reported by NAEP in the scores of the nine-year-olds in the 1980s. We may also find that the beginning reading programs of the 1970s, which paid more attention to the phonological, to the alphabetic principle, to decoding, to phonics much maligned today may have contributed to the rising scores of the nine-year-olds in the 1980s and to the higher scores of the seventeen-year-olds in the 1980s . . ."

Americans are not alone in experiencing drops in reading abilities. In Britain, educational psychologists first noted a drop in reading scores in 1990, and a government report confirmed the falling scores the next year. The exceptions were schools that employed intensive phonics programs. As a result of the ensuing outcry over the dropping reading scores, phonics instruction is once again being included in England's national curriculum."

Perhaps the most powerful case for phonics was a landmark study by Marilyn Jager Adams, conducted for Center for the Study of Reading. Adams put together what one critic called "an impressive, and often overwhelming, array of empirical research related to beginning reading." Having reviewed "the experimental findings from every conceivable field" relating to the question of beginning reading, Adams concluded not only "that proficient reading depends on an automatic capacity to recognize frequent patterns and to translate them phonetically" but that the failure to learn such mechanics "may be the single most common source of reading difficulties." Learning to sound out words, she argued, helps children learn to identify frequent words and spelling patterns because children have to pay close attention to the sequence of letters. Children learn how words are spelled because the process of sounding out words helps lock correct spelling in their minds."

Phonics is essential both for children who come to school with a solid background in reading preparation as well as for students who may come with little familiarity of letters, words, and stories. For students who are on the brink of reading, she found, "the basic phonics curriculum will generally consist less of new concepts and information than of review and clarification of things they already know." As a result, some teachers feel that an emphasis on basic phonics is inappropriate. "However," Adams's study found, "systematic phonics is no less important for these children" when it is used as a "support activity." Phonics is also opposed by some teachers of students who come to school with little background in reading. But Adams found that the problem of teaching low-achieving students to read is not the use of phonics, but the poor use of instructional materials. She found that schools with high proportions of students labeled at-risk "tend to spend not more, but less classroom time on reading instruction." Despite the need for more attention and time, schools with large numbers of students from low-income families actually schedule less time on reading than other schools - on average twenty minutes less a day.

While poorer students have a longer way to go to grasp the essentials of reading, they are being given less time to work on sounding out words, less time for "connected reading," and less time for writing. "And during the time they do read text," Adams found, "they cover less material and are less often challenged to think about its meaning or structure."

"In reaction to this situation, some may see phonics instruction as the problem with such programs for low achievers," Adams observed. "Yet the problem is not phonics instruction - all students, whether their preschool reading preparation is high, low or in-between, need to learn about spellings, sounds, and their relationships."

Phonics, wrote Adams, is so effective because "with experience, skillful readers tend to sound words out quite automatically. As a result, even the occasional, never-before-seen word may be read with little outward sign of difficulty. Just try it: pentamerous, bypermetropical, backmatack." Even more important, she argued, was the ability of phonetically fluent readers to sound out words whose meaning they know, but which they have not seen before on the printed page. This makes for more fluent reading, because children are not stopped as often by unfamiliar words.

Contrast that with the whole language approach in Joan Wittig's school district. Reading instruction begins with "pre-reading strategies" in which "Children predict what the story is about by looking at the title and the pictures. Background knowledge is activated to get the children thinking about the reading topic." Then they read the story. If a child does not recognize a word, they are told to "look for clues."

Specifically, the curriculum suggests that children: "Look at the pictures," ask "What would make sense?" "Look for patterns," "Look for clues," and "Skip the word and read ahead and then go back to the word." Finally, if all of this fails, parents/teachers are told, "Tell the child the word.""

How Kids Learn 1

by Charles J. Sykes

For generations, children were taught to read by being first taught the mechanics of reading. They were taught that letters had sounds and that they could decode words by sounding them out. At the end of a couple of semesters, a child with the mastery of phonetics could read an estimated 24,000 words. Look-say requires children to memorize whole words, much like the Chinese learn individual ideograms. Thus, they learn by reading the same words over and over again. Instead of a potential vocabulary of thousands of words, children are able to read only a few hundred. The classic example of the repetition used to bolster the look-say method was the mind-numbingly inane Dick and Jane series of books. In 1930, the Dick and Jane pre-primer taught a total of 68 different words in 39 pages of text; by 1950, the pre-primer had grown to 172 pages, but the number of words had been cut to 58. By 1950, children were being soaked with the banality of readers that repeated the word "look" 110 times, the word "oh" 138 times, and the word "see" dragged gasping into the text 176 times. Eventually, children learned to recognize the words.




Flesch was merciless in ridiculing such approaches. "Learning to read," he wrote, "is like learning to drive a car. You take lessons and learn the mechanics and the rules of the road. After a few weeks you have learned how to drive, how to stop, how to shift gears, how to park, and how to signal. You have also learned to stop at a red light and understand road signs. When you are ready, you take a road test, and if you pass, you can drive. Phonics-first works the same way. The child learns the mechanics of reading, and when he's through, he can read. Look- say works differently. The child is taught to read before he has learned the mechanics- the sounds of the letters. It is like learning to drive by starting your car and driving ahead.... And the mechanics of driving? You would pick those up as you go along."

Flesch predicted that such techniques would work no better for teaching reading than for producing competent drivers. By the mid-1980s, he had won the right to say that he had told us so.

As Flesch predicted, reading scores have dropped precipitously as schools dropped phonics and experimented with "look-say" methods or "language experience" or "whole language" programs. The intensity of the debate over the issue might suggest either that research data are mixed on the most effective reading methods or that we really don't know how children first learn to read. Neither is true. It's impossible to review here all of the salvos fired in the reading wars, but research support marshaled to support Flesch's position is formidable, to say the least.
In a 1985 study titled Becoming a Nation of Readers, a commission of the National Institute of Education found that: "Classroom research shows that, on the average, children who are taught phonics get off to a better start in learning to read than children who are not taught phonics. The advantage is most apparent on tests of word identification, though children in programs in which phonics gets a heavy stress also do better on tests of sentence and story comprehension, particularly in the early grades.

In Harold Stevenson's international comparisons, he and his colleagues found that American students tended to be over-represented among both the best and worst readers. The differences, they determined, could be explained by the presence or absence of phonics instruction. "Children who fail to catch on to this possibility tend to be poor readers; children who do learn to break down words by sound are able to read words of high complexity."
Studies that have identified the traits of effective schools - forceful administrators, high faculty expectations, an orderly school atmosphere - also found that successful schools shared similar approaches to reading including schoolwide concern about reading skills, the adroit use of reading specialists, and a phonics-based curriculum."

Why Johnny Can't Read

by Charles J. Sykes

The most dramatic declines in the achievement levels of American students have been in their literacy. SAT verbal scores have reached historic lows, while national surveys have put the number of functionally illiterate Americans in the tens of millions. A 1994 report by the Educational Testing Service found that half of the nation's college graduates could not read a bus schedule and that only 42 percent could summarize an argument presented in a newspaper article or contrast the views in two editorials about fuel efficiency.

A study that divided students into five levels of literacy found that only 11 percent of the graduates from four-year colleges and only 2 percent of graduates of two-year colleges reached the top level. Only 35 percent of the four-year college graduates were able consistently to write a brief letter about a billing error." One study found that American business loses nearly $40 billion in revenue a year because of the low level of their employees' literacy and the added time required to train and retrain workers for new technologies. Recently the Stone Savannah River Pulp & Paper Corporation had to spend $200,000 to train workers to use computers after managers found that workers lacked the reading skills they needed to operate the equipment."
Rudolf Flesch said something like this would happen.





In the mid-1950s, Flesch warned in the best-selling book Why Johnny Can't Read that American schools would produce a generation of illiterates if they continued to rely on faddish techniques for teaching reading. At the time Flesch wrote, American education was dominated by the "look-say" method of teaching instead of teaching children how to sound out words, the so-called phonetic method that had been used for generations, students were encouraged to look at and recognize the whole word. Flesch warned that the abandonment of phonics and other traditional approaches to reading was a "time bomb" primed to wreak educational havoc on the nation's schools. Although his book drew widespread attention, he was generally either ignored or vilified by educationists. But nearly four decades of experience have vindicated his Cassandra-like warnings. While national test scores of reading and writing abilities are awful enough, the experience of California may be the most obvious test case of Flesch's theory.

In 1987, California radically changed its reading curriculum to de-emphasize what little phonetic instruction still remained. In ditching phonics, California embraced what educationists called a "literature-based" approach to reading that de-emphasized "skill-based" programs. Kids would be taught to read by having them experience [more Dewey-esque influences - my emphasis and comment] the wonders of literature, rather than having to go through the dreary business of first learning the mechanics or rules of reading. It was, educationists insisted, "the natural way" to learn reading. One survey found that 87 percent of California's reading teachers embraced the new techniques and that fewer than one in ten heavily emphasized phonics. Many teachers said later that they thought the new curriculum required them to get rid of phonics altogether (a claim state educrats later denied for reasons that will soon be apparent). The result was a full-scale, statewide test of pro-phonics and anti-phonics theories.

In 1993, six years into the phonics-less curriculum, a national reading survey conducted by the Educational Testing Service found that California's fourth graders ranked forty-ninth - tied with students from Mississippi for dead last - in their reading abilities compared with students throughout the country. Even when California's nonimmigrant, white fourth graders were considered separately, they still finished in the bottom fifth of the fifty states in the test.

"There's a lot of evidence that first-graders who do not get instruction in phonics fail to read adequately," said Robert E. Slavin, director of the elementary school program at Johns Hopkins University's Center for Research on Effective Schooling for Disadvantaged Students. "It's possible that the kids in the last several years were not taught word attack skills adequately. Today's fourth-graders were in the first grade three years ago." State educrats, however, blamed the problem on a simple miscommunication. They insisted that they had never meant to totally eliminate phonics. But, inadvertently, they had provided stunning empirical confirmation of Flesch's worst fears.

The Reading Wars 2

by Charles J. Sykes

It is vital to understand the degree to which modern education is conceived as "socialization of the child". John Dewey, educational psychologist, formulated the theory that all life and experience is organic, part of a larger unified whole, and it is vital for each member of society to understand the nature of this larger whole (society), and how any individual (i.e. themselves) is part of this larger whole. Dewey was also a rabid behaviorist believing that ALL thinking, feeling, imagination, morality, decision-making and even personal responsibility are only responses to forces in one's environment. He allowed no place at all for inherent uniqueness, will, cause or creativity. He conceived personal experience to be the prime factor in determining value, usefulness and validity of anything for anyone. Basically, this idea meant that we each should feel good about conforming to the dictates of the larger, and more important "social organism", the group, class, business or society. Dewey promotes the "social entity" ad naseum in all is writings. Education, through Dewey's interpretation, and this is largely what modern education is based on, involves the student's training in conceiving himself as part of some larger group, how he fits in, being aware and concerned for the feelings of others (i.e. democracy as he defines it), solving problems so the "group" attains the highest state of "happiness" or "valued mutual experiences", and developing habits (through stimulus-response factors) which result in "worthwhile experiences" and the greatest mutual valued experience for the group.




It's really a strange philosophy, mixing the "me-me-me" attitude of personal "experiences" with the group consciousness of the all-inclusive "social entity", but a strange philosophy that is wholly endorsed and promoted extensively by all educational "authorities". Their is no individual, per se; the individual, the environment, and whatever current situation exists are all viewed together as a unified, dynamic, integrated sub-system of Nature. Education is designed to get every student to understand this, conceive of themselves as this, and to approach and deal with life from this viewpoint. The student is taught to make decisions and choices, which are still only responses to Dewey, so as to maximize his life experience while also forwarding the mutual positive experience of the larger whole.

Modern education has taken an off-the-wall philosophy of near-Nature worship, mixed with extreme Darwinian genetic evolutionary notions, and is enforcing this on all the school children as a grand experiment in social "growth and evolution". Dewey also talks incessantly about "growth" - which to him is a natural evolutionary process of "life", stimuls-response factors, and genetic mutation, but again, he views this primarily from the viewpoint of the society or the group organism. Get that he truly conceives the social entity to be almost "living", and admires it in the same way a pagan might worship Mother Earth or a Gnostic might contemplate the underlying unity and dynamic integrative process of the Universe. Personally, people can think and believe whatever they choose -I even find some of the ideas in gnostic literature interesting, but, and this is a big but, NO PHILOSOPHY or IDEOLOGY should be enforced on the public, especially the children. Laws have been passed, and huge amounts of government money support these educational ideas, which are, in fact, a complex ideology and orthodoxy about the nature of Man, the Universe and the relation of the two. See more on how modern materialistic ideologies are actually complex philosophies possessing many aspects of "religion", and why government shouldn't support them (i.e. separation of Church and State).

The basic intent of this "new education" is not to make highly intelligent, attentive, personally-motivated individuals, but to create feel-good, functional cogs for the future social machinery. Individuals and thinking minds are not important - groups and feelings are.

That fact is not always recognized in the schools of the 1990s - where, Mitchell says, "the inane and unformed regurgitations of the ninth grade rap session on solar energy as a viable alternative to nuclear power are positive, creative, self-esteem-enhancing student behavioral outcomes; the child who sits alone at the turning of the staircase, reading, is a weirdo." In one of his most searing passages, Mitchell goes even further: "Educationists just don't feel right ... about books. A book is the work of a mind, doing its work in the way that a mind deems best. That's dangerous. is the work of some mere individual mind likely to serve the aims of collectively accepted compromises, which are known in the schools as 'standards'?

"Any mind that would audaciously put itself forth to work all alone is surely a bad example for the students, and probably, if not downright anti-social, at least a little off-center, self-indulgent, elitist."

Much of modern educational theories and practices frown upon individualism, personal choices, goals, and activities, because these are considered traits of selfishness and self-centeredness which ignore the greater interest of the group. Understand this for what it is - socialism - enforced social consciousness.

The Reading Wars

by Charles J. Sykes

Given its importance, it is not surprising that the dispute over the teaching of reading is the site of some of the most intense and emotional battles in the school wars. Reading is at the heart of education, the basic skill upon which all others are built. History is full of examples of extraordinary educations based solely on the cultivation of language, through reading and through the mastery of words to express cogent and coherent thoughts. You'd hardly know this, though, from reading educationist theorizing about "communication arts skills" and "reading skills."




Typically, educationists contrast the ability to read and write coherently with what they call "higher-order thinking skills," which they insist are far more important for children to learn that any "rote" skills of the past. But there is another way of looking at reading. The "high-order thinking skills" - such as inquiry skills, inference, analogy analysis, and the like are really only the building blocks for the genuinely higher order skills. "Much more worthy of being called 'higher-order skills'," argues Matthew Lipman, director of Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children, "are reading, writing, and computation. The reasoning and inquiry skills are relatively simple and eminently teachable. One might think of them, together with mental acts, as fairly atomic, in contrast with which reading, writing and computation are enormously complex and molecular. "In other words, the so-called "higher-order thinking skills" are merely building blocks to the far more complex process of understanding required for reading, writing, and math. Reading a work of literature requires the integration of all such skills, as well as drawing upon knowledge, insight, and intuition. Mastering "inquiry" skills is to reading Moby Dick what the mastery of musical theory is to playing Bach's "Ave Maria." Important, yes; maybe even crucial. But not the highest order.

Reading is also the model for thinking precisely because it is an individual, solitary activity; one mind alone with another. A book is a single voice, expressing a singular point of view, and requires the individual attention and response of the reader. Of all of the activities of education, it is the most personal. Despite all of the hopeful therapeutic posturing about collective thinking in education, thought, like reading, is not a collective undertaking. All thinking, ultimately, is individual. Perhaps that is why it does not seem to fit into the modern school's emphasis on cooperative learning, consensus, sharing of feelings, and group orientations. "The acts that are at once the means and the ends of education, knowing, thinking, understanding, judging, are all committed in solitude," Mitchell writes. "It is only in a mind that the work of the mind can be done. . . . "

The New Illiteracy

by Charles J. Sykes

Dumbing Down Our Kids is a searing indictment of America's secondary schools - one that every parent and teacher should read. It offers a full-scale investigation of the new educational fad, sometimes called "Outcome Based-Education" - the latest in a long series of "reforms" that has eroded our schools.



Find out:

• Why our kids rank near to, or at the bottom of international tests in math and science
  
• Why "self-esteem" has supplanted grades and genuine achievements
  
• How the educational establishment lowers standards and quality in our schools - while continuing to raise their budgets and our school taxes
  
• The dumbing down of the curriculum so everyone can pass - but no one can excel How parents, students, and teachers can evaluate schools and restore quality teaching