By 1930, the Progressives were ready to launch their drive to get look-say textbooks into every primary classroom in the nation. The two leaders in the drive were William Scott Gray, Dean of the University of Chicago's School of Education, and Arthur I. Gates, Thorndike's protégé at Teachers College. Gray had gotten his M.A. at Teachers College in 1914 and his Ph.D. in 1916 at the University of Chicago under godfather Charles H. Judd. The latter had gotten his own Ph.D. in 1896 in Leipzig under Wundt. In 1907 Judd became director of the Psychology Lab at Yale, and in 1909 went to the University of Chicago where be became head of the School of Education. He translated Wundt's Outlines of Psychology into English in 1907 and wrote Reading, Its Nature and Development in 1918. He also became president of the American Psychological Association in 1909. All during his career Judd was a dominant force within the NEA. He was a stockholder, along with Thorndike, in Cattell's Psychological Corporation. In the NEA he was particularly active and influential in its Department of Superintendence. His ability to get good jobs for his graduate students, particularly during the Depression, was a key to his influence. He too was anxious to implement the Dewey educational revolution. In December 1930, the NEA Journal began publishing a series of
articles on reading instruction by Gray whom it described as "the most
eminent authority in the field of reading. " The final article appeared
in June 1931. No other educator had ever been given so much space in the
NEA Journal. For Gray and his publishers it was free advertising,
for in 1930 Scott Foresman had just published the first edition of Gray's
"Dick and Jane" primers. In a few short years they would become the dominant
reading textbooks in America's primary schools. Both publisher and author
would make millions of dollars while at the same time causing a national
epidemic of reading disability.
The types of poor readers may be classified roughly into several groups, namely: non-readers, including those who encounter unusual difficulty in learning to read; those who can read to some extent but who are notably deficient in all phases of reading; those who encounter difficulty primarily in recognition, in comprehension, in rate of reading, or in oral interpretation; and those who are not interested in reading or who have narrow rather than diverse reading interests or who exhibit undesirable tastes in reading.Nowhere in the article did Gray use the term dyslexia, or any other exotic medical term to describe the cause of poor reading. Yet in April 1935, only five years after "Dick and Jane" had gotten into the schools, Gray, in an article in the Elementary English Review described a whole new syndrome of problems that were causing reading disability: mental deficiency or retardation, defective vision, auditory deficiencies, congenital word blindness, developmental alexia, congenital aphasia, dyslexia, congenital alexia, strephosymbolia, cerebral dominance, handedness, eyedness, ambidexterity, emotional instability, etc. Dr. Orton had been right. The sight method would indeed cause reading disabilities on a massive scale. It was also in 1930 that Macmillan published Arthur I. Gates's primers. Both "Dick and Jane" and the Gates Program of Reading primers were based on the teaching methods developed by Thorndike: the use of a small number of sight words serving as stimuli and repetition of the same words as the conditioning response. The social content of the books followed John Dewey's prescription in School and Society. Dewey opposed using myths and fairy tales in primers. They stimulated private imagination rather than the social spirit. He wrote: Some writers appear to have the impression that the child's imagination has outlet only in myth and fairy tale.... The John and Jane that most of us know let their imaginations play about the current and familiar contacts and events of life - about father and mother and friend, about steamboats and locomotives, and sheep and cows.Thus, the focus in the new look-say primers was on home relationships in which the child's social development was stressed. Dewey wrote: Little children have their observations and thoughts mainly directed toward people: what they do, how they behave, what they are occupied with, and what comes of it.... Its intellectual counterpart in the story-form ... the holding together of a variety of persons, things, and incidents through a common idea that enlists feeling.... Their minds seek wholes, varied through episodes, enlivened with action and defined in salient feature - there must be go, movement, the sense of use and operation.The result was such literary gems composed by Dr. Gray as: Also, the books had lots of pictures, for Dewey had said in My Pedagogic Creed: "I believe that the image is the great instrument of instruction."Dick Of course, that contradicted all of human history in which it had been proven since the beginning of time that language, not image, is the chief instrument of both learning and instruction. Only the deaf rely on image more than language, and even they must master language to achieve any high degree of learning. Both "Dick and Jane" and Gates's primers - which later became the "Nick and Dick" books - appeared during the Depression when the schools were strapped for money. But Gates tried to persuade schools that buying new books was, in fact, a way of economizing. In an article entitled "Printed Material: Economy or Extravagance?" in the April 1933 NEA Journal, Gates wrote: Under the present conditions, when the need for reduction of expenditures is insistent, a marked extension in the use of books and printed learning materials, instead of being an extravagance, is the most obvious and certain means of economizing without impoverishing education.Actually, the Depression probably saved millions of children from becoming functional illiterates, for many schools were unable to afford the new look-say textbooks and thus continued to use the old phonics books until they wore out. However, when it came time to buy new books, they bought look-say. Indeed, they had no choice. Phonics books were no longer being published, and unless you had an old teacher who could teach phonics from her own experience or parents who could teach you to read at home, you now stood a good chance of becoming reading disabled. Another strange phenomenon took place in the early 1930s that smells of conspiracy. The old primers began disappearing from the libraries of America at a time when book theft was unheard of. Charles F. Heartman in the 1934 edition of his Bibliographical Check-list of The New England Primer, writes: The most curious fact is the impossibility of locating some New England Primers sold during the last thirty years. They seem to have vanished for all efforts to locate some of them have proven futile. A number of copies located in the first and second edition of this book cannot be found now. Some have disappeared even from the libraries, probably due to the crime wave which spread, a few years ago, over all the libraries in the country.Was it a mere coincidence that while the Progressives were in the process of changing reading instruction in America, all of the old primers that were used in the past to achieve high literacy vanished into thin air? Was this done to make sure that future teachers could not go back to the old methods, or to prevent some enterprising publisher from reprinting them? In October 1934, a Macmillan ad in the NEA Journal for the Gates Program of Reading boasted: "It has achieved tremendous success in all sections of the country, actually revolutionizing the teaching of reading in modern times and is acknowledged generally as the leading method today." But it didn't take long before the negative effects of the method became obvious. The October 1936 NEA Journal began publishing a series of articles on reading problems by Arthur I. Gates and Guy L. Bond, in which it was pointed out "that there are probably nearly a half million children in the first four grades of American schools whose educational career is blocked by serious disabilities in reading." Surely Gates must have known that it was Thorndike's conditioning method that was causing the blockage. But this was only a preview of things to come. The articles were entitled "Failure in Reading and Social Maladjustment" (October 1936), "Reading Disabilities" (November 1936), "Prevention of Disabilities in Reading" (December 1936 and January 1937). What was diagnosed as causing all the trouble? According to Gates the new look-say primers introduced too many sight words too soon and repeated them too few times. Gates wrote in the December article: The typical reader introduces a new word in about every 15 running words. Experiments have shown that this vocabulary burden is very heavy for even the brightest pupils and that it is overwhelmingly difficult for the slow learners.What was his solution to the problem? Fewer words and more repetitions. Gates explained: All these experiences have indicated, indeed, that it would be desirable for each first-grade child to have 200 or 300, or even more, running words of reading matter for each and every new word introduced, instead of from 15 to 40 which represents the typical range.In other words, you won't have any reading problems if you teach the children fewer words and have them repeat them interminably. And so the look-say primers were revised accordingly. In The New Illiterates, published in 1973, I compared the earlier and later editions of Dr. Gray's pre-primer. The revisions made in 1951 were a virtual admission of look-say's utter and dismal failure as a reading instruction method: In 1930 the Dick and Jane pre-primer taught 68 sight words in 39 pages of story text, with an illustration per page, a total of 565 words and a Teacher's Guidebook of 87 pages. In 1951 that same pre-primer had been expanded to 172 pages, divided into three Separate pre-primers, with 184 illustrations, a total of 2,613 words, and a Guidebook of 182 pages to teach a sight vocabulary of only 58 words! ...Did the revisions do any good? Apparently not, for the problems of reading disability continued to grow in scope and complexity. But what was especially significant was Gates's acknowledgment that slow learners in particular found look-say "overwhelmingly difficult." That would explain why, before look-say was adopted, slow learners learned to read without great difficulty via the alphabetic phonics method. That fact was recently confirmed in the updated edition of Dr. Jeanne Chall's book, Learning to Read: The Great Debate. She wrote: Enfield's (1976) study was concerned with a group below average in reading readiness tests, scoring below the 25th percentile. In her pilot study, she compared 15 children receiving an experimenter designed synthetic phonics program with a matched sample receiving an analytic phonics program (look-say] in a popular basal-reading series. In all comparison - reading comprehension, word recognition, and spelling - the direct-synthetic group was significantly ahead. She extended this study with 192 first graders, comparing their progress with similar children the year before. The results also favored the direct-synthetic on all three measures.You may be confused by the technical language, but "analytic phonics" is the kind of incidental phonics taught in look-say reading programs as phonetic clues. Synthetic phonics refers to the alphabetic phonic method, sometimes known as "phonics first." Despite this recent research evidence overwhelmingly in favor of phonics, most of the schools in America still teach look -say in one version or another, to the particular detriment of slow learners who unquestionably need intensive phonics in order to succeed. In the late thirties, Gray and Gates and other look-say authors revised their reading programs to accommodate the problems they were causing. However, the situation only got worse. By the 1940s the term "dyslexia" had become a household word. In April 1944 Life magazine ran a major article on the subject, reporting: Millions of children in the U.S. suffer from dyslexia which is the medical term for reading difficulties. It is responsible for about 70% of the school failures in 6- to 12-year-age group, and handicaps about 15% of all grade-school children. Dyslexia may stem from a variety of physical ailments or combination of them - glandular imbalance, heart disease, eye or ear trouble or from a deep-seated psychological disturbance that "blocks" a child's ability to learn. It has little or nothing to do with intelligence and is usually curable.The article went on to describe the case of a little girl with an I.Q. of 118 who was being examined at the Dyslexia Institute of Northwestern University. After her tests, the doctors concluded that the little girl needed "thyroid treatments, removal of tonsils and adenoids, exercises to strengthen her eye muscles." The article concluded: Other patients may need dental work, nose, throat or ear treatment, or a thorough airing out of troublesome home situations that throw a sensitive child off the track of normality. In the experience of the institute these range from alcoholic fathers to ambitious mothers who try to force their children too fast in school.
Gray, Gates, Thorndike, Cattell and Judd must have had a good laugh over that one! The method was working beyond their wildest dreams. What is particularly significant is that Dr. Orton, Dr. Gates himself, and Life magazine all described the problem as a "blockage" to learning. Men as skilled in psychology as Gates and Thorndike knew exactly what was causing the blockage, yet Gates denounced criticism of look-say to the very end. Meanwhile, Collier's magazine of November 30, 1946 published an article entitled "Why Can't They Read?" After stating that "A third of all school children are illiterate," the magazine went on: It's nothing new, it's been going on for years. It is common knowledge among educators that at least one third of our school children lag behind their age and grade in reading, all the way through school. Thousands emerge from high school totally unable to read and comprehend so much as the daily paper. As for reading for pleasure-only a lucky minority ever learn to do that.Now that the Deweyites had confirmation that they could induce massive illiteracy in the classroom by using their methods, there was nothing to stop them from eradicating that hated independent intelligence that stood in the way of socialism. They would fight tooth and nail any attempts to go back to the old methods of teaching reading. And that's exactly what they did when Why Johnny Can't Read was published in 1955. The book was important because it identified the cause of the reading problem: the look-say method. Other writings in popular and education magazines had told about the reading problem, but none of them had identified and pin-pointed its cause. Rudolf Flesch had done it in no uncertain terms, and he named the professors by name. And that's why their reaction to Flesch was so vehement. He made them appear stupid, as if they really didn't know what they were doing. Flesch presented eleven research studies that proved phonics to be superior to look-say as a method of teaching reading. He seemed to say: "Look, you silly fools, phonics works better than look-say. " What Flesch didn't know is that the professors already knew that. They knew it when they devised the look-say method. Dewey had in fact admitted that children taught by look-say would not read as well as those taught by phonics. Huey happily admitted that children taught by look-say would misread all over the lot, Hall had shamelessly extolled the virtues of illiteracy, and Gates had acknowledged that slow learners found look-say "overwhelmingly difficult." It is obvious that Gray and Gates knew exactly what their mentors' aims were since they were the very disciples chosen and groomed to carry them out. It is naive to assume that the disciples were not as devoted to these aims as were their masters, for the key to their advancement within the hierarchy was the degree of devotion they brought to their mentors' cause. The dangers posed by Flesch and other critics of look-say prompted Gray to create an organization that could exert much stronger control over the teachers of reading in America, one that would create a united front against growing parental dissatisfaction. The spread of reading disability had created a need for remedial teaching, and two organizations had been formed for professional purposes: the National Association of Remedial Teaching (1946) and the International Council for the Improvement of Reading Instruction (1948). In 1956 Gray and his colleagues decided to merge these two groups into one major professional organization, the International Reading Association (IRA). It would, in a few short years, become the impregnable citadel of the look-say method. Gray, as expected, was elected its first president, and most of the presidents who followed have been look-say textbook authors. In 1956 the IRA had a mere 7,000 members; in 1983 it had 65,000. It now publishes four journals and holds an annual convention that attracts as many as 13,000 registrants. In addition, many of its regional and state organizations hold annual local conventions of their own. Also, it collaborates closely with the NEA. So if you are one of the many Americans who wondered why nothing improved after Flesch's book came out, there's the answer. Meanwhile the NEA did its job in discrediting Flesch and keeping the teachers in line. In the September 1955 NEA Journal Gates blasted Flesch, accusing him of trying to "discredit American education." In the October 1955 issue, an article by one of Gates's graduate students, Nila Banton Smith, then professor of education at New York University, reminded teachers of the important social purposes behind reading. Professor Smith wrote: We are on the brink of a new epoch in reading instruction.... In the future, reading instruction must concern itself with much more than pedagogy. It must mesh more directly with the gears of vital social problems and needs.The November 1955 NEA Journal published another blast at Flesch entitled "Why Can't Rudy Read." The authors wrote: Most of the book is simply opinion (unsupported by any objective evidence), quotations out of context, accounts of Flesch's limited personal observations, and some amusing (tho occasionally vicious) rhetoric.At no time did the NEA Journal offer Flesch the opportunity to reply to his critics, nor did it ever suggest that the dispute over phonics and look-say could be resolved by independent research. For an organization known for its propensity to form commissions, it's surprising that the NEA has never sponsored a commission to investigate the cause of the reading problem. But then, in 1967, a book was published which indeed caused the look-say establishment a bit of embarrassment. The book, Learning to Read: The Great Debate, was written by Dr. Jeanne Chall, a respected member of the International Reading Association and a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. After several years of intensive research into a mountain of studies done on beginning reading instruction, Chall came to the conclusion that the phonics, or code approach, produced better readers than the look-say method. In short, it was a clear vindication of what Rudolf Flesch had asserted 12 years earlier. Since the book had been written for the educational rather than the popular market, it did not make the kind of waves in the general press that Flesch's book did. Still, Chall had given ammunition to the Progressives' worst enemies, and the profession dealt with her in its own way. The reviewer in the IRA's Journal of Reading (January 1969) wrote: What prevents Chall's study from achieving respectability is that many of her conclusions are derived from a consideration of studies that were ill-conceived, incomplete and lacking in the essentials of suitable methodological criteria. In her eagerness to clarify these studies she allowed her personal bias toward a code emphasis to color her interpretations of the data....Other reviewers in the Reading Teacher, Elementary English, and Grade Teacher were equally critical of Chall, seriously reducing the impact of her findings. However, in deference to her position as a member in good standing of the educational establishment, the NEA permitted Dr. Chall to air her views in the February 1969 NEA Journal. In an article entitled "Beginning Reading: Where Do We Go From Here?" Dr. Chall voiced cautious optimism that reading instruction would improve, with more phonics being taught earlier. However, the Journal of April 1969 ran an article by Lyman C. Hunt, director of the Reading Center at the University of Vermont, which was quite critical of Chall's views. The NEA would not permit Chall to have the last word. Nevertheless, in response to the Hunt article, Donna Connell, a teacher from California, wrote (September 1969): The research is overwhelmingly in favor of a decoding emphasis in beginning reading.... Without decoding skills, early sight readers are completely dependent upon the teacher....If some teachers had switched from look-say to phonics, it was because phonics had begun to make something of a comeback in 1963 when several publishing houses came out with new phonics-oriented reading programs, the first since the 1930s. But the major look-say publishers still retained at least 85 percent of the market. After all, the graduate students of Gray, Gates and other look-say professors were in key positions throughout the educational establishment. Their criticisms of Chall's book created almost as much controversy and confusion over her findings as they did over Flesch's. Also their influence on textbook selection committees guaranteed the continuation of look-say in the schools despite frantic pleas from parents for phonics. Twenty-two states have statewide textbook adoption procedures. In 1980, for example, Texas chose only look-say primers for its primary schools, and in 1982 California did virtually the same, thus guaranteeing the perpetuation of the reading problem in two of our largest states well into the 21st century. Despite Chall's influence, reading scores continued to decline. In New York City, for example, the 1972 reading scores were the worst ever recorded. Only 32 percent of the pupils were reading at or above grade level. In 1973 the Board of Education in New York became jubilant because that figure had risen to 33.8 percent, a 1.8 percent improvement over the previous year. And in 1974 New York was satisfied because the scores held steady at 33.8 percent. At the same time it was revealed that there had been widespread cheating on the tests, so the real scores were probably a lot lower than the recorded ones. This is what look-say had done to the nation's largest public school system which, prior to the introduction of the whole-word method, had taught hundreds of thousands of children from immigrant families to read fluently and competently. Meanwhile, the Progressives found other ways to counter their critics. They changed the vocabulary of the debate. The whole-word method was no longer referred to as look-say. It became known as "psycholinguistics." The educator who brought that word into usage was Dr. Kenneth S. Goodman, a look-say author and one of Gray's most promising disciples. Goodman obtained notoriety when he told a New York Times reporter (July 9, 1975) that it was perfectly all right if a youngster read "pony" for "horse," because it meant that the youngster had gotten the meaning. Somehow it didn't matter to Dr. Goodman if the youngster didn't know the difference between a pony and a horse or a car and a truck, or an ape and a man. After William S. Gray's death in 1960 - he accidentally fell off a horse, not a pony, although he might have thought he was on a pony - Goodman became look-say's new leader. He was particularly adept at defending whole-word textbooks against the new phonics competition. He wrote in the May 1967 Journal of the Reading Specialist: The teacher's manual of the Lippincott Basic Reading incorporates a letter by letter varians in the justification of its reading approach: "In short, following this program the child learns from the beginning to see words as the most skillful readers see them ... as whole images of complete words with all their letters."We must be grateful to Dr. Goodman for being so honest in proclaiming what he believes reading is: a guessing game, albeit a "psycholinguistic" one. Ancient hieroglyphics required a lot of guessing, and so do modern Chinese ideographs. And that's why the alphabet was invented, to eliminate the guessing and to make reading an exact skill. Once you are trained in translating written sound symbols into the exact spoken words they represent, precision in reading becomes automatic. Perhaps, Dr. Goodman doesn't consider precision in reading important, except when negotiating contracts with his publisher, or defining the benefits in his retirement plan, or knowing the schedule of his appointments. We live in a highly technological civilization that demands precision in virtually every working aspect of life. But Dr. Goodman and his colleagues are preparing American children for a world of guessing and imprecision more attuned to the stone age than the age of the computer. The year 1981 was an important one. It was the year in which Rudolf Flesch came out with Why Johnny Still Can't Read and Kenneth Goodman became president of the International Reading Association. Flesch wrote: "Twenty-five years ago I studied American methods of teaching reading and warned against educational catastrophe. Now it has happened. What was NEA's reaction? Their contempt for both Drs. Flesch and Chall was best expressed by their declaration in the 1983-84 Annual Edition of Today's Education that "the overemphasis on phonics with beginners" is now "ready for the scrap heap." In their lists of books recommended for "Must Reading," they neither listed Flesch's new book nor Dr. Chall's updated edition of The Great Debate. They listed Language and Literacy: the Selected Writings of Kenneth S. Goodman. Need more be said? Get The Book!NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education by Samuel L. Blumenfeld - the story of the National Education Association, it's ties to socialism, progressive education and behavioral psychology. If it's a part of public education, the NEA approved it.Suggested Reading List - the Demise of the Educational System - OBE (Outcome-Based Education), NEA (National Education Association), educational psychology, German psychology & influences, demise of public education, educational sabotage, Wundt, Pavlov, Dewey, Skinner, Watson. Say NO To Psychiatry! 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