John Dewey, Dumbing Down, and The Scandal of Dyslexia
Bruce Deitrick Price
February 14, 2007
My encounter with John Dewey (America’s most famous educator) began in the trenches of the reading wars. There the big question is: why did our educators discredit phonics, which works, and promote another approach, called whole word, which doesn’t work? Why, indeed?
To carry off this scam, educators relentlessly attacked Rudolph Flesch, the reading expert who celebrated phonics in two huge best sellers (1955, 1980). I thought that Flesch was merely stating the obvious--phonetics has to be the smart way to teach a phonetic language. Anyway, you can be sure that our educators knew all the arguments pro and con even as they taught only one side of the debate, and even as they ridiculed Flesch. I ended up feeling sorry for the guy; I wanted to write up his story. But right off, I ran into the question of motive. Why had American educators acted in this bizarre way--ignoring truth, embracing the unworkable? Why, indeed?
Let me state the mystery more grimly: why did our educators use every imaginable stratagem to protect policies that twisted millions of children into functional illiterates, usually with behavioral disorders (often lumped under the heading ADD) and reading disabilities (often lumped under the term dyslexia)? These bad effects are everywhere visible in American society. However, even the biggest expert I contacted couldn’t explain motive to me. “Our educators,” he said, “are jerks.”
Not satisfying. I wanted to get inside their heads. So I read anti-phonics guru Frank Smith (no easy task) and lots of other stuff, working my way back in time to the early 1900s. There, of course, you run smack into John Dewey and the founders of Education in this country. All so long ago. People might assume that events more than a century past couldn’t hurt us now. Wrong. It’s not until you confront John Dewey that you start to understand how American education got so screwed up that illiteracy and dyslexia are ordinary.
John Dewey, in his long life, wrote dozens of books and hundreds of articles. A lot of it is murky and ambiguous. Whatever you wish to promote, you can find support from Dewey. But in the interest of speed, let me summarize: he and his buddies were Socialists. They were sick of individualism, the pioneer spirit, free enterprise, and people doing their own thing. John Dewey wanted you to be a happy member of a group. You didn’t need that much literacy or knowledge. Dewey actually saw these as impediments. He calls, especially in the early grades, for sharply curtailing the study of literature, history, math, science, geography and such, in order to make room for social activities, specifically, “cooking, sewing, manual training, etc.” (his words). So here, tragically and pathologically, John Dewey, Educator, metamorphosed into that most unexpected of things: John Dewey, Anti-Educator. To advance his sociopolitical visions, Dewey was eager to dilute content and diminish learning.
It has to be granted: John Dewey was a super-brain, one of our smartest and most productive people. But finally he’s like Marx. Wrong, wrong and wrong. Thinkers on the far left tend to talk a lot about the Workers, the Masses, the People, but they don’t have much regard for individual people. Dewey and Co. ended up in the leveling and flattening business. I can’t see that we needed John Dewey in his own day; and we don’t need him now. I finally outlined my analysis in a formal report with this somewhat informal title: “Phooey on John Dewey” (easy to find in Google). Truthfully though, that title is my bottom line. The man deserves jeers and catcalls because he has caused a lot of trouble.
And let me assure you, the beat goes on. The education establishment idolizes Dewey as an American Aristotle. They need him as the justification--The Authority--for policies that can’t easily be justified. Wannabe teachers in ed schools are whipped into line with this refrain: “John Dewey said...” Google his name; you’ll find pages of sites that treat him as a god. Dewey provides excuses for the leveling that our educators so dearly love. (As far as I can tell, the only reasonable idea Dewey had is a commonplace: people learn best by experience, by doing something themselves. If you want to teach kids how to change a tire, have them change a tire. Did we need Dewey to tell us that?)
The beat not only goes on, it gets louder. Dewey’s bias against literacy and individual achievement fosters (and then hides) learning disabilities. According to our public schools, dyslexia (just a fancy word for reading problems) is QUITE COMMON. But Rudolph Flesch said it was extremely uncommon, as rare as deafness, blindness and serious brain injuries. He and many other experts conclude: dyslexia is NOT caused by faulty brains but by faulty pedagogy, i.e., whole word. Outrageous! Surely, America’s parents will figure it out. Not so fast. There is now a parade of people blowing smoke about dyslexia--it’s said to be genetic, or chemically caused, or induced by parents, or it just falls out of the sky. Anything but that teachers induce it in children by making them memorize thousands of “sight words.” You can find entire articles and sites dealing with dyslexia, where there is no mention of, or interest in, how the afflicted children were taught to read. Furthermore, our educators are committed to gimmicks like invented spelling, fuzzy English, slang, and not correcting errors. Why? Because in a classroom where mistakes and bad habits are the norm, children won’t realize how messed up they are, and parents won’t be able to figure out what damage is being done to their children. Whole word, dyslexia, alleged genetic problems, false strategies, bad outcomes--each provides cover for the other. What parent can sort out cause and effect? That seems to be the plan.
Are you on the fence about any of this? Note well: Marva Collins, one of America’s true educators, guarantees that her approach will teach any child to read by Christmas of their first year. Rudolph Flesch said this was the normal experience wherever phonics was used. But our educators do not ensure that students know how to read even many years beyond that. These frauds pretend to care about students but somehow end up doing everything possible to make sure those very students are dumbed down and semiliterate. It all started with John Dewey. There were other ideologues who could share the blame, but if you have to pick one man for the honor, I nominate Dewey as the Father of Dumbing Down.
To sum up: this dumbing down--unstopped, ramifying throughout the curriculum--leads to a more ignorant population, millions of functional illiterates, and real cognitive problems such as dyslexia. My sense of it now is that the dyslexia epidemic is one of the great unreported scandals in our country. But the tide has shifted back to phonics; troublesome statistics are emerging. Maybe the roof is about to blow off this shack. If a class action lawsuit can be filed against McDonalds for fattening some children, surely a suit can be brought against the public schools (or the deans of the ed schools) for churning out millions of dyslexic children. Note that children don’t have to go to McDonalds; they don’t have to eat cheeseburgers. Children--and their parents--have many dietary choices, and freedom to embrace them. None of which is true in reading. The public schools have a monopoly. They lie to parents. What’s it worth if you keep a child illiterate? In lost pay, lost self-esteem, that kind of thing. Multiply times 40,000,000. Dyslexia ought to add another quarter-million in punitive damages, per victim. We’re looking at a multibillion dollar suit here. Where’s a class action law firm when you need one?
Visit Improve-Education.org to read the writer’s articles “A Tribute to Rudolph Flesch” (#21) and “Phooey on John Dewey” (#25).
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