Not all at once, by some surgical procedure.
No, this will be a slow, subtle process, taking place over years. Every step will be conducted with utmost seriousness. Scientific validity will be claimed. Endless research will be constantly referenced.
If there is little progress or outright failure, teachers always seem amazed, as if such a thing had never happened before. Principals explain that the school is doing everything it can, if only parents would help in this delicate training.
Children and families will be told with absolute confidence: we use the best methods here and our students learn to be lifelong readers. Neither assertion is true.
What sort of people could participate in such a charade? How could they come to work each day, observing happy, normal children in the playground, and knowing they will be kept from reaching their full potential?
Learning to read (or learning not to read) is a somewhat technical process. Even if done quickly, it could take almost a year. If done badly, the process simply seems to take longer. Surely next year the child will get it, or the year after that. Meanwhile, elaborate tutoring and remediation services are available. Drugs can be prescribed.
Throughout this entire process, the family never understands what is going on. The children never understand what is being done to them, i.e., they are being made permanently illiterate. They don’t get better. At the same time, they don’t get worse. Never having been literate, they can’t judge the difference. We have millions of children in the third or fourth grade who cannot read appreciably better than when they first got there.
So what has been happening in all those many months and hundreds of hours of instruction? Nothing has been happening, that’s the genius of reading in America (and several other English-speaking countries). Teachers use methods that don’t work. Many teachers may sincerely believe that they are doing the correct thing. That’s an important part of the program’s success. The teachers are brainwashed when they’re at ed school; or they are forced into line by relentless directives from on high. They’re not allowed to pick the curriculum. Nothing changes unless many parents complain. Often as not the school district will choose an equally bad reading program.
We can’t blame much on the teachers, although they should speak up more than they do. You have to look at the top of the education food chain. Look, for example at the professors at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Look at superintendents of large districts. These are the people in charge; these are the people making sure that millions of children are not learning to read.
That verdict is a harsh one and makes us uncomfortable. But this pattern goes back to 1930s, when Whole Word was first introduced. It can’t work; and the people in charge had to know it didn’t work. (Phonics is always the correct choice). It’s simpler to understand all our problems if you simply accept this description: the fix was in. Ideologues plotted to make sure that the schools would dumb down children, rather than elevate them. Bogus methods had to be used.
Apparently, they want to control the society. To do this they needed to make everybody dimmer than they are themselves. Quite a challenge for these soulless little technocrats; but they were not deterred. They had billion-dollar budgets and a staff of thousands. All these people were laboring away on further refinements, new marketing copy, clever jargon, in order to sell bad ideas to an overly trusting public.
Possibly they are proud of themselves. They did create 50 million functional illiterates in the US. That’s people who almost without exception could have been taken up another notch or two. But they were, carefully and designedly, kept semi-literate.
It’s fascinating to contemplate people so committed to a cause, so vicious, so oblivious to what they’re doing with their lives, that they would engage in the systematic dumbing down of children. How else can we describe what they did?
Another school year will start soon. Will millions more children be ground down by quackery? Or will the country’s intellectual common sense assert itself?
All that’s necessary for evil education ideas to triumph is for good people to do nothing.
Reading Is Easy. -- You have to work to make kids illiterate
