The Sad Story of Rudolph Flesch

PLEASE SEE UPDATE AT END::::::::::::Here Is A Mystery: Why Did Our Educators Rosetta Stone Spanish Embrace Theories About Reading That Actually Seemed to Keep Children From Learning To Read? Starting around 1925 whole language (a/k/a look-say) took over American education. The take-over lasted more than 60 years. The debate continues but phonics is back on top.I am working on a tribute to Rudolph Flesch, the lonely prophet who wrote Why Johnny Can't Read and, 25 years later, Why Johnny STILL Can't Read. Everything he said seems to me common sense. But the educational establishment, to a remarkable degree, was able to ignore him, stonewall him and discredit him. Why?More and more, I find only TWO viable theories to explain this mysterious bit of American history. 1) Our top-level educators were earnest bumblers, a gang that couldn't shoot straight. Or 2) Our top-level educators were clever Rosetta Stone Spanish V3 --and ruthless--ideologues who pushed look-say as a way to level or dumb down millions of students. Flesch maintains that so-called dyslexia is virtually unknown when children are taught phonetically. By seven or eight, at the latest, children are wired to read. Not being able to read is a statistically unusual thing, like blindness or deafness. But look-say generated millions of people with weird reading problems (and jobs for thousands of people who were called in to remedy the problems). Let's suppose, with Flesch, that all this pain and failure were unnecessary. Flesch writes two books lucidly explaining how things really are. He shines truth upon the land. Incredibly, educators ignore him. The suffering continues; illiteracy makes a comeback. It's a really sad story.... UPDATE--early 2007: all three parts of my tribute to Flesch are on my essay site, Improve-Education.org (#21). The subtitle is: "A Short Sad History of American Education During the 20th Century." I had to research all the way back to the 1880's to figure out why our educators are so drawn to bad ideas. The evidence is overwhelming that Dewey and Company set out to diminish literacy. Look-say was a weapon in that campaign. Our educators decided that Americans Rosetta Stone Hindi V3 didn't really need so much reading, writing and arithmetic. People should be trained for the slots they would fill. In short, there was a betrayal of everything that most people assume educators stand for. New and relevant: 30: The War Against Reading and 33: How To Help A Non-Reader to Read, both on Improve-Education.org.