Welcome to the twilight zone

Welcome to the twilight zone
Welcome to the twilight zone. The US is said to have 50 million functional illiterates and 1 million dyslexics. Guess who caused all this damage and failure? The children, of course. It’s all their fault. They’ve got bad genes. Bad parents. Bad phonological skills. Bad left brain-right brain cooperation. Bad karma. Bad something.

It can’t be said enough: the children themselves have caused themselves to be unable to read.

Meanwhile, the education establishment, the public schools, the schools of education, and the education professors are, as anyone can plainly see, not guilty of gross incompetence, not guilty of criminal malpractice, not guilty of intellectual child abuse, not guilty of dumbing down an entire society by ensuring that children would not learn to read even by middle school.

See how crazy it is? The public schools are doing an absolutely disgraceful job of making sure that kids can read. But do they ever apologize or take responsibility for this failure? Never. They have worked out an entire alternative universe where all their ideas are genius, and all kids are cognitively impaired. And the handiest, most all-embracing impairment is dyslexia. The education establishment loves this thing. Our top educators have decided that dyslexia is as common as air among our young people. If a kid is breathing, odds are good that he’s dyslexic. Which means what, by the way? In the great majority of cases, it means nothing more or less than that the school has not taught the child to read.

Meanwhile again, all the experts I trust talk confidently of nearly every child learning to read in the first grade (by age 7 at the latest). Rudolf Flesch (even in his grave), Mona McNee, Siegfried Engelmann, Marva Collins, Don Potter, and Samuel Blumenfeld are some of reading's real stars. I trust any sentence from these people before I trust a book by the people venerated at the ed schools.

Well, place your bets, ladies and gentlemen. Do you trust the experts who gave us 50 million functional illiterates and a continually declining educational system? Or the people with a long track record of promoting literacy and academic success?

The more I studied Whole Word, and concluded for myself how idiotic it is, the more I was sure that the people pushing it are not our friends. (They seem to be better understood as a new type of barbarians eager to destroy our civilization.)

Please see my newest graphic video on YouTube--“The Strange Truth About Dyslexia”--which sums up all these ideas in about four minutes.

I also just published a related article: "Dyslexia, Disability, and Deception: What Five Experts Say."

My big theme now is that, to save the country, we first have to save the schools. To do that, we have to save reading. First step: understanding what the heck happened to reading.

About the Author


Bruce Deitrick Price founded Improve-Education.org. His fifth book is THE EDUCATION ENIGMA--What Happened to American Education."