The Great Phonics Exodus was Followed by Mass Illiteracy
What I learned from Sam, #6
While reading another of Sam Blumenfeld’s books (The New Illiterates: And how to keep your child from becoming one, 1973 and 1988), I came across an intriguing quote. When responding to the high percentage of “functional illiterates” among inmates, Chief Justice Warren said this:
““The percentage of inmates in all institutions who cannot read and write is staggering. The figures on illiteracy alone are enough to make one wish that every sentence imposed could include a provision that would grant release only when the prisoner has learned to read and write.””
Sam documents what happened to American literacy rates when phonics instruction was replaced by look-and-say methods.
For example, do you know that…
During the War in Vietnam there were so few recruits who met the military’s literacy standard that Defense Secretary McNamara was required to change the policy? that recruits with the equivalent of a 6th grade education were allowed in? that McNamara started a pilot program providing reading and writing classes? And that, interestingly enough, the chosen program was phonics instruction?
Or that Dr. Grant Venn, Assistant United States Commissioner for Vocational and Adult Education was quoted as saying, “Illiteracy is really a much greater functional handicap than the loss of limbs.”?
Or that The Congressional Committee on Education and Labor (1969) claimed that “one out of every four students nationwide had significant reading deficiencies,” and that “in large city school systems up to half of the students read below expectation.”?
Or how about the fact that The New York Times (May 20, 1970) reported that “half of the nation’s adults may lack the literacy necessary to master such day-to-day reading matter as driving manuals, newspapers and job applications, according to a study just published at Harvard University.”?
Child with Alpha-Phonics book
And that even the well-loved CBS news anchorman, Walter Cronkite, wrote in Signature Magazine (May 1970), that many who can’t read depend on news broadcasts for staying informed, and that since the TV news gives such an abbreviated version of stories (not nearly what a reader could learn from more complete documents), the nation-itself was in crisis? “The result,” he said, “is a genuine crisis in communication. Since a democracy cannot flourish if its people are not adequately informed on the issues, the problem becomes one of the nation’s survival.”
And the problem continues…
““According to the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of U.S. adults 16-74 years old –about 130 million people – lack proficiency in literacy, reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.””
The solution, says Sam, comes through a return to systematic phonics instruction. This is not to be confused with what Rudolf Flesch (Why Johnny can’t Read, 1955) described as fake phonics.
Systematic phonics teaches the letter sounds, and letter-sound combinations, as they are blended to make whole words. It trains the eyes to move from left-to-right across words and sentences in a process called “tracking”.
This is the method Sam uses in his textbook, Alpha-Phonics: A Primer for Beginning Readers.
Samuel L. Blumenfeld author of “Alpha-Phonics: A Primer for Beginning Readers”
Please follow my blog as I travel through the findings of reading instructors such as Sam Blumenfeld, Rudolf Flesch, myself and others.
Then join the battle for teaching American children to read again.
You’ll be a hero for sure!
