A thought-provoking article by Bruce Deitrick Price at the American Thinker wonders Whatever Happened to Phonics? ~

 
 
For those who weren’t fortunate enough to learn to read with this method, a little introduction is appropriate. Introduced by Rudolf Flesch in the mid-50’s, phonics wasn’t so much a new way to teach reading as a revival of the original, natural, most effective way to do so. Instead of memorizing “whole words,” beginning readers learn to decode new written words by sounding each one of them out.
 
In his 1955 book “Why Johnny Can’t Read,” Flesch explained that ~

… if you make children memorize English words as graphic designs, you have changed English into a hieroglyphic language. You have thrown away 40 centuries of human history, making English much like Egyptian circa 2000 BC. You have turned a phonetic language, which most children can learn to read in first grade, into a symbol-language that most children can never learn to read. Nobody could possibly be that stupid, right? Wrong.
 
Here is how Flesch explained our predicament in the famous 1955 book:
 

We have decided to…learn to read English as if it were Chinese. One word after another after another after another. If we want to read materials with a vocabulary of 10,000 words, then we have to memorize 10,000 words; if we want to go to the 20,000 word range, we have to learn, one by one, 20,000 words; and so on. We have thrown 3500 years of civilization out the window and have gone back to the age of Hammurabi.”

 
Flesch believed that if he carefully made his case for phonics, the teaching establishment would understand the obvious and permanently adopt this effective method. He failed to account for the intractable, 20th century progressive ~
 

These professors of education, essentially a far-left cult, had forced sight-words into the schools circa 1935 and they were not going to let go. They would pretend, they would lie, they would wiggle like a snake to victory any way possible.
 
So what did they do? They ridiculed Rudolf Flesch (“Devil in the Flesch”) and went right on doing all the bad things they had previously been doing. They formed the International Reading Association (IRA) to consolidate their gains, and to quarantine Flesch. Further, they fashioned endless sophistries to justify their incorrect methods. They kept the field of reading mired in jargon and techno-talk.

 
And, Price is convinced, today’s educators are still sadly failing Johnny when it comes to reading ~

… teachers who haven’t read “Why Johnny Can’t Read” (or “Why Johnny STILL Can’t Read,” 1981) should acknowledge that they are clueless amateurs. Such a person should not be allowed in an elementary school. Why? Because you will not be able to recognize inferior methods and the damage they’re doing to children. All phonics experts confidently assert that 99% of children can learn to read in the first grade. If you are accepting a lower level of achievement, then you are part of the problem.

I can personally testify to the effectiveness of the phonics method. After three years in public school my son could barely muddle through a sentence. One year of homeschooling with phonics and he was reading at grade level. It works!
 
Which really makes you wonder about our public school system and what they’re really trying to accomplish when they ignore time-tested methods – like phonics. And embrace nonsense like Common Core.