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And yet they still struggle mightily to figure out why it's happening.For years, everyone trying to undermine K–12 often had to look the other way. They didn’t dare discuss Rudolf Flesch’s famous book explaining why Johnny can’t read. Instead, these resourceful meddlers treated Flesch as a pariah. They won the battle. As a result, a huge percentage of Americans can hardly read or write. Our schools don’t bother with geography, arithmetic, history, basic science, etc.
But why would our subversives want these particular victories? Come on, let’s state the obvious impasse. Schools are supposed to transmit knowledge, right? What would be the motive for deviating from this most excellent tradition?
Two hundred fifty years ago, President John Adams explained the whole thing in eleven words. He said, “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people.” In other words, the first step in destroying liberty is to take knowledge away from the people. That goal has been largely accomplished by our education professors. How did John Adams figure this out in 1775, but many of our credentialed experts are only now perceiving the ruin that endless mendacity can bring to a society? We sink to the level of our leaders, and then lower.
Recently I encountered the most important insight about reading I’ve ever seen in our media. It appeared on a major education site and reveals the angst among academics that even the better students have become increasingly ignorant and illiterate.
The author, Teresa MacPhail, wrote, “We all kind of feel lost these days, myself included. … I keep coming back to there’s something broken in American culture. The response of my fellow academics, however, reassures me that I’m not simply indulging in intergenerational grousing. Anecdotally, I have literally never met a professor, who did not share my experience.”
I’m sure this writer struggled mightily to justify and then forget the central alibi: massive educational failure is just one of those things. After all, she’s writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, godfather of conventional wisdom on education. In her heart, I bet she agrees with me, a practical reformer. I bet she suspects that our decline is counterintuitive and can be explained only if shysters have taken over.
A second teacher-journalist, Adam Kotsko, responding in Slate, said that the literacy crisis he has seen among his students is different from anything before. He describes it as a “conspiracy without conspirators. No one literally set out to design a system in which students were not taught the skills they need to become effective readers.” Oh, really?!
I am reminded of Germans saying they didn’t know about those death factories in the woods. Our Education Establishment has shown genius at deliberately selecting theories and methods that, despite the rosy claims, turn out not to work. Then the self-appointed experts, by a blitzkrieg of sophistry and jargon, numbed common sense. So here’s a teacher with a job in K–12 who thinks there are no conspirators when it seems to me there’s not much else.
Do you wonder why so many students at all levels are dropping out of school? They’re depressed from not learning anything, rarely understanding anything, consumed as they are by false theories. All they know is that they’re in school for many years but can’t read. They feel very stupid, and they want to escape from this place ASAP.
Why Johnny Can’t Read came out in 1955 and sold millions of copies. Flesch explained that the professors were asking children to learn to read English words as if they were Egyptian hieroglyphics or Chinese ideograms (which are memorized visually one by one). He said that surely, everyone understands that this approach is insane.
That is the only mistake made by Flesch. He underestimated the desperate creativity of our ideologue professors. They told the lies necessary to throw phonics in the gutter.
For me, understanding the great American reading hoax was a project lasting years. I finally learned that after the Russian Revolution circa 1919, Lenin and Stalin loudly proclaimed the Communist International. They had just defeated imperial Russia and believed they could defeat the smaller United States. Agents of influence (that’s the technical term) were sent around the world to infiltrate media, education, government agencies, foundations, and cultural institutions. That was the true beginning of a 100-year war, which at times has been called the Cold War. By 1921 these conquistadors, AKA the Comintern, were aggressively involved in American politics down to the state and city level. (If any of this history is news to you, please ask your A.I.)
Here is another brilliant quote from John Adams: “Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak, and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all his laws.” That’s what smart sounds like.
The usual suspects like to make phonics sound very complicated. No, it’s easy. The kids have to memorize the letters, their names, their sounds, and that English reads left to right. This process takes several months. That’s why phonics experts insist that they can teach virtually all children to read in the first grade. The pretenders we have now squander most of the K–12 years so the children remain struggling readers indefinitely. That’s what teachers are finally having to acknowledge: huge waste going nowhere.
When phonics experts insist they can teach every child to read in the first grade, why would anyone support a method that hardly teaches children to read, ever? It was difficult for me to understand these treacheries. But I did understand the pattern common among communist dictators like Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, and so on. They always want to be at the top of a centralized government so they have all the power and can kill almost anyone who threatens them. Naturally, they prefer everyone else to be dumb, uninformed, and passive. I believe that’s the true meaning of illiteracy for the commissars among us.
The melancholy thing about K–12 is that so few upscale people bother noticing the rot. We have the new Department of Government Efficiency. Now we need DOEE, the Department of Education Efficiency. A reasonable goal would be at least twice the education for less than half the price.
I’ve been thinking for years that we need some very successful business people to get involved. In the last election, I watched Bill Paxton, financial whiz, separate himself from the loony left, and I thought, that’s the guy for the job. Seriously, Mr. Paxton, I hope you consider this. Trump will ask, What are you waiting for?
Bruce Deitrick Price is the author of Saving K–12. (His new novel, The Boy Who Saves the World, is a smart, fast-paced mystery. Very entertaining. It’s sci-fi about A.I., but women like it as much as men do.)
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