How Johnny Reads

Of all the statements recently made in criticism of the public schools,' none has stirred up quite such an argument as the sentence in Rudolf Flesch's bestselling Why Johnny Can't Read: "The teaching of reading--all over the United States, in all the schools, and in all the textbooks--is totally wrong and flies in the face of all logic and common sense." How accurate is Flesch's gloomy picture? Last week, in the Chicago Sun-Times, a onetime assistant professor at Western Reserve who is now a reporter spoke up for the educators. Flesch's book, says Ruth Dunbar, "is a caricature, not a portrait . . . Johnny does learn to read in today's schools." It is true, says Reporter Dunbar, that most schools have in the first grade abandoned the old phonic (i.e., letter by letter and syllable by syllable) method of teaching a child to read in favor of the word method (i.e., teaching the child to recognize whole words by their appearance). But they have done so because, at the beginning, letters alone "are meaningless to the child." Thus "they teach Johnny to recognize at sight and as wholes a small number of simple words that he already uses in speech. He learns to know these like the faces of old friends, without analyzing the parts." The Straw Man. "But after Johnny knows 50 to 100 words by sight, he begins to analyze the letters and sounds that make up words . . . By the end of the first grade, he usually has learned most of the consonants. In second grade he works on vowels. By third grade, he should be able to figure out by sight a large number of new words. In fourth grade, phonics instruction continues with use of the dictionary."

Though Flesch cites statistics to prove that children taught by phonics read better than those taught by the word method. Reporter Dunbar has her own sets of figures to prove the contrary. But statistics aside, her major charge against Flesch is that he has grossly overstated his case. If she does not succeed in demolishing Flesch entirely, she does succeed in placing the battle in perspective. "Flesch's hue and cry about no phonics in the schools," says she, "is directed at a straw man."

The Baby & the Bath. "Had Flesch written his book 30 years ago, he would have been on sounder ground. He might even have saved American schools from a bad blunder. Phonics, the prevailing system of the past, was kicked out the door of the little red schoolhouse in the mid '20s. New research--especially on eye movements and on the psychology of learning--convinced educators that there was a better way of teaching reading. It was learned that the mature reader does not spell his way through words, letter by letter, but reads by phrases. Besides, educators found that an exclusive diet of phonics bored children and produced slow, laborious readers. So they went overboard for the word-memory system, which they called 'see-and-say.'

"In the extremity of reaction, they had thrown the baby out with the bath . . . With no help in learning letters and only 'see-and-say,' children floundered. After about ten years, sanity returned and phonics became respectable again. "But it never regained its former standing as the be-all and end-all of reading . . . Today's method, reading specialists feel, combines the merits of the two extremes--phonics on the one hand, word-memory on the other. It teaches the mechanics of reading, but it keeps its eye on the main goal--reading for meaning."

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