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Some education experts quoted in Rudolf Flesch’s 1955 “Why Johnny Can’t Read”:
Dr William S Gray, U of Chicago (1948): “The recent trend toward...the old alphabetic or phonics method is viewed with alarm by educators.”
Dr William S Gray, U of Chicago (1948): “The recent trend toward...the old alphabetic or phonics method is viewed with alarm by educators.”
Dr Paul Witty, Northwestern University (1939): “English is essentially an unphonetic language.”
Dr Donald D Durrell, Boston University (active at BU 1930’s and 40’s): “The skillful teacher will be reluctant to use any phonetic method with all children.”
Dr Roma Gans, Teachers College, Columbia Univ (faculty 1929-1959): “In recent years phonetic analysis of words at any level of the reading program fell into disrepute.”
Dr Guy L Bond, U of Minnesota (faculty 1942-1971): The child should be allowed to ‘typewrite’ only after he has a certain degree of ability in reading. Otherwise he is apt to become too conscious of the letter-by-letter elements of the word.”
Also Bond, in 1952 book Teaching the Child to Read”:
“The teacher’s major tasks during this time are to introduce the words in a meaningful fashion so that the children have contextual clues to aid them in guessing the word...
“The teacher’s major tasks during this time are to introduce the words in a meaningful fashion so that the children have contextual clues to aid them in guessing the word...
... The words should be recognized as whole words. It is detrimental indeed to have the children spell or sound out the words of the stage.”
Irving H Anderson/ U Mich; Walter F Dearborn/ Harvard (‘52):
“Little is gained by teaching the child his sounds & letters as a first step to reading. More rapid results are generally obtained by the direct method of simply showing the word to the child & telling him what it is.”
“Little is gained by teaching the child his sounds & letters as a first step to reading. More rapid results are generally obtained by the direct method of simply showing the word to the child & telling him what it is.”
Edward A Dolch (yeah, THAT Dolch!) U Illinois (1941): The simplest solution when a child does not know a word is to tell him what it says.”
These are the modern experts who built our reading system. The people they educated are now educating our teachers. It was going to be a brave new world of progressive education. These roots run deep and are hard to pull.
