Let's Rescue Reading: Here's The Plan

For 75 years, our Education Establishment has pushed an unworkable reading pedagogy based on the myth that children can learn to read by memorizing thousands of English words as SHAPES. This method--usually called Whole Word, Sight Words, or the Memory Method--produces widespread educational failure (specifically, fifty million functional illiterates and more than a million dyslexics).

This approach cannot possibly work, as this short article will show:

Most people can memorize a few hundred sight-ANYTHING (flags, logos, currency symbols, paintings, or words); however, 500 is already a major undertaking. English words, because they appear in multiple forms (e.g., brighter, BRIGHTER) are especially difficult for the memory. Mastering 2,000 sight-words is a Herculean task requiring MANY years and probably as well a near-photographic memory. But English has 1,000,000 words; college-level literacy requires 100,000 words. Clearly, the whole scheme is prima facie impossible. Why do educators take children down this dead-end road?

Schools all over America continue to force five- and six-year olds to start their education by memorizing 200+ sight-words. Once the brain gets trained this way (the wrong way), it's hard to learn to read properly. Next stop: "Sorry. Your child is dyslexic."

This scandal was already huge by 1955 when Rudolph Flesch wrote "Why Johnny Can't Read." But the scandal doubled and quadrupled as elite educators kept pushing what they should have seen was impractical and harmful.

Some people believe that only ruthless ideologues could engineer something so destructive. Others say, no, the top educators are just hopelessly incompetent. Either way, these people deserve our condemnation. But let's focus on the essential point, which is to eliminate this lunacy from the schools.

Virtually nobody can learn to read using Sight Words. Conversely, virtually everyone is damaged by trying. Years are wasted. Kids lose self-esteem and fall behind in all subjects. Whole Word is wholly stupid.

Here is another way of grasping the essential flaw. Naming a word-design is NOT the same mental process as reading a word. The first process uses brute memory; the second process uses clues and reminders contained inside the printed word. All of this is easy to demonstrate: assemble 100 photographs of famous people and a printed list of their names. Everyone can read the 100 names faster than they can identify the 100 photographs. Memory is fickle. Invariably there will be lapses when you say, "Oh, I've seen every movie he was in. I just can't think of his name... " More commonly, there will be telltale hesitations. "...oh, that is...uh...." (This explains why real readers don't hesitate, but sight-word readers routinely hesitate.)

To rescue reading, we have to face this unpleasant fact. The Education Establishment perversely favors a method that, ACCORDING TO ITS OWN CLAIMS, progresses very slowly and takes 5-10 years, if then. On the other side, phonics advocates state that most of their students learn to read in first grade. What kind of people would recommend the agonizingly slow method?

Our Education Establishment has been able to keep this strange scam in play by constantly changing its name, and by wrapping the essential defects in lies and alibis. Please, imagine yourself in first grade trying to memorize the English language ONE WORD AT A TIME, a few hundred this year, a few hundred next year, a few hundred more in third grade, a few hundred more in fourth grade....well, you'll probably imagine yourself screaming, "No blankety-blank way!!"

For short, simple explanations of why Whole Word doesn't work, please see graphic videos I created for YouTube, for example, "Phonics versus Whole Word" or "Why Sight Word Don't Work" (other titles will appear on the right side of the YouTube page).

For a longer more historical examination of how this fraud was forced upon the country, Google "30: The War Against Reading."

Please, let's fight and win the Reading Wars. Let's get rid of every Sight Word, every Whole Word, every Word Wall, every Dolch Word. Then we can go on to win the Education Wars.

(Bruce Deitrick Price is the founder of Improve-Education.org, which has many articles on reading. His fifth book is THE EDUCATION ENIGMA.)