The new illiterates--and how you can keep your child from becoming one

This book is part of the great trilogy in American education: Rudolph Flesch's "Why Johnny Can't Read" (1955); "The New Illiterates" (1973); and Flesch's "Why Johnny STILL Can't Read" (1980). Flesch is better known but, make no mistake, Blumenfeld is as important a figure and as eminent an authority. Here's the common theme: each book pointed out in its own way that the U.S. was reeling before an illiteracy plague; each book provided the shrewd, patient analysis that would return the country's schools to phonics and sanity. Shockingly, the country's obtuse educators went right on producing illiteracy and dyslexia. (The most charitable thing you can say about these people is that they were "useful idiots.") In any event, due to that obtuseness, these three books--all "old" in one sense--remain ever fresh. I enjoyed reading "The New Illiterates," for the first time, 35 years after its pub date. Blumenfeld is wonderfully smart and, I would add, wise. "The New Illiterates" consists, basically, of four parts: an analysis of the Whole Word approach as found in Dick and Jane books; an investigation of the history of Whole Word; a 50-page phonics primer so you can school-proof your child; and an evaluation of more than a dozen of the best-selling basal readers, most of which Blumenfeld concludes "can cause associational confusion, dyslexia, strephosymbolia, and other reading disabilities." "The New Illiterates" is now a history book, a time capsule, showing that everyone knew early on that the country was a mess. Blumenfeld quotes a Life magazine report from 1944 that "Millions of children in the U.S. suffer from dyslexia." 1944! The International Reading Association, formed in 1955, presumably to counter Flesch, spread the Whole Word dogma all these years, and still tries to. Children are STILL taught sight words, Dolch words, and the rest of the quackery. (I just spoke to a parent who said his third-grade child sees THE and reads IT.) Blumenfeld writes with sense and clarity: "In whole-word methodology, the entire concept of the alphabet is so obscured, so fragmented, so mutilated, that a great deal of damage is easily done to the child's learning capabilities. It takes years, sometimes, to straighten out a child who has become so confused in that first year." "Some children give up even before the fourth grade level. Those children become known as `dyslexic'--a fancy medical term coined especially to describe the perfectly normal, intelligent youngster who can't learn how to read by the whole-word method." "[Average students] seem to read with an adequate speed, but they make many errors along the way. They would drop words, read words that weren't there, sometimes rearrange the words in a sentence. They were never aware of their errors and never stopped to correct themselves, unless someone was there to point out errors. If not, they would read on, even when their error altered the meaning of the sentence. My point is that these readers w