Dr. Flesch's Cure-All

VIRGIL M. ROGERS, Dean of the School of Education at Syracuse University, has come to his position after more than thirty years of service in the public schools. As teacher,principal, and superintendent he is eminently qualified to evaluate Dr. Rudolph Fleseh’s recommendation that parents and not professionals should teach children to read.

by VIRGIL M. ROGERS

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IN SPITE of the fact that public school authorities think that last spring’s high school graduates are by and large the best produced to date, college English teachers take the dim view that too many of the new crop of freshmen are poor readers and spellers.

A number of parents are dissatisfied with their children’s reading progress even before they get to college. Nevertheless, the elementary and high schools have done a creditable job on the whole. Illiteracy in World War I meant inability of a recruit to read and write his own name, while in World War II it meant failure to complete the fourth grade in school. The more than one hundred “then and now" studies of school achievement indicate that reading is at least as well taught today as formerly.

Some of these st udies indicate marked superiority, as in the case of Northwestern University’s study of 529 Evanston, Illinois, junior high pupils, tested as nearly as possible under the same conditions as students taking the same tests in 1933. The results, announced last May, showed that today’s eighth-graders “made significantly higher scores in reading, spelling, and arithmetic reasoning problems and were about the same in arithmetic computation.” They were also noted to be considerably younger than the eighth-graders of 1933.

Complaints from the general public, however, continue to center on reading and spelling deficiencies, often accompanied by vague suggestions as to how these can easily be cured. Dr. Rudolph Fleseh. lately the most strident of these crities, is all too explicit about what should be done. His most recent book, Why Johnny Can’t Read and What Can Be Done About It, published last spring by Harper and Brothers, has been bought and discussed widely. An abbreviated form appeared in syndicated newspaper installments all over the country, often with editorial blessing and highly slanted chapter headings, and hundreds of classroom teachers find themselves reaping a harvest of mistrust, antagonism, and divisiveness which Fleseh has sown.

Dr. Flesch’s highly readable journalism is addressed to fathers and mothers as opposed to teachers and beamed with the personal you-and-I approach of the television advertiser. Slightly more than half the book develops his thesis that children in the United States, in contrast to those in other parts of the world, are being made into poor readers and spellers—“word guessers" because our schools, dominated by “entrenched experts" in the teachers’ colleges and by profit-seeking textbook writers, “threw phonics out the window" about 1925 and substituted “the word method.”Because educators “do not want the truth" and our schools follow one line as truly as though we had an “allpowerful Ministry of Education,” the only solution is for parents to teach their children how to read by the alphabet and phonic method before sending them to school. We should start our children at the age of five the way the British do. “Reading readiness,”says Dr. Fleseh, “is a myth.”

The second part of the book is devoted to a “guaranteed method" of instruction for parents to use, based on Dr. Flesch’s own experience in correcting the reading difficult ies of a twelve-year-old neighbor, Johnny. The preschool child is to be started on the short sounds of the five vowels, then moved to the consonant sounds. When he becomes “reasonably good at connecting the right sound with the right letter,”he is to be started on seventytwo exercises beginning with one-syllable words containing short vowel sounds in combination with all the consonants. The exercises then progress through various consonant combinations to twosyllable words, long vowels, and diphthongs. The “home primer" ends with a list of eighty threeand four-syllable words which Johnny will have learned simultaneously to read and write and— Dr. Fleseh implies—to spell. He can then read anything that is set before him.

Educators object to Dr. Flesch’s cure-all just as physicians object to a packaged patent medicine prescription for an illness without benefit of diagnosis. One specific objection to Dr. Flesch’s argumenls is that he seems to equate reading with mere pronunciation of words. It is because comprehension is the sine qua non of all reading that modern reading authorities advocate a child’s learning words always in context. They therefore strongly condemn the “seventy-two exercises,” which consist solely of lists of words. They wonder what might be the five-year-old’s concept of such words as sum, zest, quench, teem, coy, foist, cloy, and many others which he is to learn to read, write, and spell—in isolation — as he proceeds through the exercises.

Educators object also to Dr. Elesch’s contention that phonics alone will produce perfect spellers, since one principal direction which misspellings lake is toward phonetic spelling. The “current campus favorites” listed on page 40 of his book incidentally. the “favorites" of campuses fifty years ago — include many examples: grammer for grammar, miricle for miracle, and so on.

Educators object to Dr. Flesch’s book on other grounds than its subject matter. They decry his pandering to the all too human but essentially nonproductive tendency to blame somebody rather than to seek the truth; to the attempt to increase divisiveness between home and school in order to promote his argument. From one who has been an advocate of The Art of Plain Talk (1946) and The Art of Clear Thinking (1951), this new book comes as an extremely muddled effort indeed. As the blurb on the cover asserts, it is “an angry book.”Therein, I believe, lies the secret of its confusion— blind, unreasoned anger that can cause a man to make extravagant statements, such as, “If they had their way, our teachers would never tell the children that there are letters, and that each letter represents a sound.”Such anger can trap a man in his own contradictions. “The teaching of reading all over the United States, in all the schools, in all the textbooks— is totally wrong and flies in the face of all logic and common sense,”says Dr. Flesch (italics mine); then he proceeds throughout the book to cite various schools and textbooks of which he approves.

Anger can cause a man to set himself up as an authority in a field toward which his emotions have propelled him. To maintain this elevation, Dr. Flesch must then write scornfully and inaccurately of such long-respected reading experts as William S. Gray, Arthur I. Gales, and Emmett Albert Belts.

An angry man could persist, even in the face of easily verifiable facts to the contrary, in his belief that “there are no remedial reading cases in Austrian schools ... in Germany, in France, in Italy, in Norway, in Spain practically anywhere in the world except in the United States.”Backwardness in Heading was published in London in 1953 by a British teacher named John Duncan; Fred J. Schonell’s Backwardness in the Basic Subjects indicates that around 15 per cent of British students present remedial reading and spelling problems, boys twice as often as girls, much as in the United States.

The question of reading came up last summer during Syracuse University’s Canadian-American workshop for school administrators. Canadians frankly told us that they have reading problems too. Dr. C. C. Goldring, visiting consultant for the workshop and for twenty-five years Director of Education in Toronto, Ontario, reported that the Toronto school system has been operating its own reading clinic for the past six years and that remedial work extends into the high school. Dr. Bjorne Karlson, a former elementary school teacher in his native Norway and now specialist in “reading difficulties" at San Diego State College, writes: “Hallgren, in Sweden, estimated that 10 per cent of all Swedish school children are cases of specific reading disability. . . . In Gothenburg, I saw more elaborate remedial reading material than I have encountered anywhere in the United States.”Denmark has a separate journal, Laese pedagogen (The Beading Teacher), devoted entirely to the subject. The Norwegian Ministry of Education has recently subsidized a program for the training of remedial reading teachers.

As to Dr. Flesch’s contention that the United States itself had no problems until “phonics was abandoned in favor of the word method.”one can only wonder how he could have missed such a. landmark as Horace Mann’s Seventh Annual Report as Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, covering the year 1843. Mann was describing a word method which he had been fascinated to observe in German schools. His enthusiastic description suggests that it was a combination of word and phonic and kinesthetic methods.

In his war against the alphabet method then exclusively used in Massachusetts schools, Mann had written in a report five years earlier: “More than eleven twelfths of the children in the reading classes in our schools do not understand the meaning of the words they read.”He was determined that a better way of teaching reading be found. In 1925, American educators were seeking still better ways, and the job itself had increased manyfold.

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Dr. FLESCH thus stands self-convicted of confusion and downright distortion. Yet what led the reader to this “angry book” in the first place may still remain: Ids child does not read well and he is worried. What can he do? The parent of such a child has every right to press for an answer.

Quite possibly the child is not a retarded reader. Perhaps the parent has become worried because at some time he thrust a bit of reading matter into the child’s hands, asking him to read it aloud, and the child did not, in the parent’s estimation, measure up. Consullat ion with the child’s teacher is the first step in finding out whether or not a real problem exists. It cannot be too strongly urged that this approach to the teacher be made at a time convenient for her, and in good spirit. Some teachers are poor interpreters; some are like those parents who think they are giving an answer if they place the “blame” somewhere. Some — there’s no blinking the fact — are poor teachers who do not even like children. The chances are, however, that the teacher will be glad to work closely with the home in the strengthening of her pupil’s reading skills.

There is much good written material that could increase understanding of modern met hods of teaching reading, books such as Kathleen 15. Hester’s Teaching Every Child to Head, put out by Harper’s education division, and William S. Gray’s On Their (hen in Reading, Scott-Foresman, 1948. Most teachers would be glad to lend reading material to interested parents, perhaps some of the excellent bulletins provided by the textbook companies.

John Horsey’s “Why Do Students Bog Down on the First R?” published originally in Life, May 24, 1954, illustrates many things, two of the most important being the way local committees can be helpful and the way a gifted citizen in a democracy can contribute to the good of his community.

Another especially good article, which deserves a wider circulation than its forbidding title and its appearance in a professional journal have given it, is “Classroom Use of Clinical Principles and Techniques in Remedial Reading,” by Sister M. Jeromine., I.H.M., director of the reading clinic at Marygrove College, Detroit (Catholic Educational Review, May, 1954).

“The question foremost in the mind of the parent on the day of the testing,” says Sister M. Jeromine, “is usually, ‘Why didn’t this child learn to read?’ ... In some cases the question may never be answered [italics mine], but it really matters little as long as both reading disability and the personality maladjustment respond lo reading therapy. It is one of t he greatest eonsolat ions of a reading clinician to see the therapeutic efleet of tutoring upon the child’s personality. The secret, perhaps, is the ‘golden touch’ of individual attention in an atmosphere of complete acceptance of the child.”

As to method: “The clinician’s attack on the reading problem itself is directed by the principle that every child can learn to read within his capacity if the method best suited to him is used [italics mine]. All educators recognize that the method must be adjusted to the child, not the child to the method.

. . . If visual skills are low, with auditory powers average or better, the obvious method to use is the phonic approach supplemented by the visual, perceptual training so that eventually the child’s visual memory will improve and enable him to learn nonphonetie words by sight.”

for the skilled teacher this will not be as difficult as it sounds. With the employment of grouping and subgrouping, and appropriate materials under the direction of a remedial reading consultant, the regular classroom teacher can effectively meet the needs of the majority of her pupils. The first principle, says Sister M. Jeromine, is for the teacher to have the attitude that “it is not a reading problem she is solving, but a child she is helping to mold.” The parent who reads Sister M. Jeromine’s article will not need this further admonition, but here it is: Do not hesitate to take advantage of any available reading clinic services for a retarded reader.

Now what about the schools themselves? There must be a widespread orientation of teachers, regardless of their subject mailer specialties, from kindergarten through the university graduate school, to be more alert and more sympathetic to reading problems. Too often the college teacher’s attitude has been one merely of criticism of the high school or the grade school, when he might have been a key factor in the salvaging of a potentially good student.

Not nearly enough work is yet being done in the high schools. High school teachers, like college teachers, have been too much inclined to think they can do nothing about “what the grade school didn’t teach.” Particularly in matters of reading rate, development of comprehension, variation of reading method to meet different purposes, all high school students need help in some degree regardless of Dr. Flesch’s assertion that everything will come to Johnny automatically. There must be more remedial consultants who can help the classroom teacher do a better job.

I should like to see more public-school-connected reading clinics, not because these would mean more reading problems but rather because they would mean more chances to correct such problems. As it is now, most clinics art’ operated in connection with university and college programs. There is need for more good clinics to which children could go without expense to their parents. Some school districts do already help with such costs.

I confess my inability to match Dr. Flesch with some simple formula of my own which will guarantee a reading millennium. Any such formula would prove fallible as his has done. Reading methods, like words themselves, are more effective when they exist in combination rather than in isolation, in spite of our regrettable tendency to think we must choose this or that.

One is left finally with some concern for Johnny himself. Have his parents really tried to impose upon him Dr. Flesch’s “guaranteed method”? I take reassurance from knowing a little about the resourcefulness of children.

The old-fashioned recipe for rabbit slew begins: “First catch one rabbit.” I am comforted to reflect that many a five-year-old Johnny is probably fleet of foot, like the rabbit.