The evil ice is melting. New York Times and Education Weekly concede that phonics is essential even though scorned for almost a century by organizations such as the New York Times and Education Weekly.

In 1955, Rudolf Flesch published his famous book Why Johnny Can't Read, a monumental counterattack against the bogus ideas preached by the Communist International. Starting in 1919, these Marxist ideologues waged a far-ranging assault on Western civilization, specifically, dominant theories about property, family, religion, capitalism, bourgeois virtues, and the correct way to teach reading.

Fortunately, one of the great men in America history was dragged into this tragedy when he was asked to tutor a neighbor’s child circa 1951. Poor Rudolf encountered a very unhappy 12-year-old boy who, after six years of school, couldn't read at all. Flesch was stunned and incredulous. Here was a mystery that needed to be explained.

His famous book begins with a letter to the boy’s mother (which I have cut down to only 10% of the original size so that everyone will read it):

A LETTER TO JOHNNY'S MOTHER

I have decided to start this book with a letter to you. You know that the idea came to me when I offered to help John, with his reading. It's really his book — or yours. So the only proper way to start it is with the words “Dear Mary”….

Today Johnny can read — not perfectly, to be sure, but anyone can see that in a few more months he will have caught up with other boys of his age. And he is happy again….

What I found is absolutely fantastic. 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. Johnny couldn't read until half a year ago for the simple reason that nobody ever showed him how. Johnny's only problem was that he was unfortunately exposed to an ordinary American school….

You know that I was born and raised in Austria. Do you know that there are no remedial reading cases in Austrian schools? Do you know that there are no remedial reading cases in Germany, in France, in Italy, in Norway, in Spain — practically anywhere in the world except in the United States? Do you know that there was no such thing as remedial reading in this country either until about thirty years ago? Do you know that the teaching of reading never was a problem anywhere in the world until the United States switched to the present method around about 1925? This sounds incredible, but it is true….

Now, what is [the correct] system? It's very simple. Reading means getting meaning from certain combinations of letters. Teach the child what each letter stands for and he can read. Ah no, you say, it can't be that simple. But it is….

Our system of writing — the alphabet — was invented by the Egyptians and the Phoenicians somewhere around 1500 b.c. Before the invention of the alphabet there was only picture writing — a picture of an ox meant “ox,” a picture of a house meant “house,” and so on….As soon as people had an alphabet, the job of reading and writing was tremendously simplified….

We have decided to forget that we…now 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 3,500 years of civilization out the window and have gone back to the Age of Hammurabi….

You know what that means? It means that if you teach reading by this system, you can't use ordinary reading matter for practice. Instead, all children for three, four, five, six years have to work their way up through a battery of carefully designed readers, each one containing all the words used in the previous one plus a strictly limited number of new ones, used with the exactly ‘right’ amount of repetition. Our children don't read Andersen's Fairy Tales any more or The Arabian Nights or Mark Twain or Louisa May Alcott or the Mary Poppins books or the Dr. Doolittle books or anything interesting and worthwhile, because they can’t….

So what does he get instead? He gets those series of horrible, stupid, emasculated, pointless, tasteless little readers, the stuff and guff about Dick and Jane…

Naturally, the stupendous and frighteningly idiotic work of concocting this stuff can only be done by tireless teamwork of many educational drudges. But if the textbook house put only the drudges on the title page, that wouldn't look impressive enough to beat the competition. So there has to be a “senior author” — someone with a national reputation who teaches how to teach reading at one of the major universities….

Consequently it’s utterly impossible to find anyone inside the official family of the educators saying anything even slightly favorable to the natural method of teaching reading. Mention the alphabetic method or phonetics or ‘phonics’ and you immediately arouse derision, furious hostility, or icy silence….

Or take the case of the late Dr. Leonard Bloomfield, professor of linguistics at Yale. Dr. Bloomfield wasn't just any scholar in the field of language; he was universally recognized as the greatest American linguist of modern times. His masterpiece was a book simply called Language, published in 1933….

In the last few pages of that book, Bloomfield dealt with the teaching of English and reading in our schools. "Our schools," he wrote, “are utterly benighted in linguistic matters.... Nothing could be more discouraging than to read our ‘educationalists’ treatises on methods of teaching children to read….”

Then I ran across a book by the Italian educator Dr. Maria Montessori, published way back in 1912. Dr. Montessori, who was a world-famous progressive kindergarten teacher, taught her little Italian four-year-olds (!) the shapes and sounds of the letters of the alphabet and had them reading within weeks…

Everybody knows that all alphabetic systems are phonetic? Oh no. I quote from page 297 of Reading and the Educative Process by Dr. Paul Witty of Northwestern University: “English is essentially an unphonetic language.” This is so ridiculous that it should be possible to just laugh about it and forget it. But the reading ‘experts’ have created so much confusion that it's necessary to refute this nonsense….

The next step in this great structure of nonsense and confusion is careful avoidance of the teaching of the letters: “Current practice in the teaching of reading does not require a knowledge of the letters,” says Dr. Donald D. Durrell of Boston University….

What does all this add up to? It means simply and clearly that according to our accepted system of instruction, reading isn't taught at all. Books are put in front of the children and they are told to guess at the words or wait until Teacher tells them. But they are not taught to read — if by reading you mean what the dictionary says it means, namely, “get the meaning of writing or printing." [End of Flesch’s letter to Johnny’s mother]

So here we are, the 70th anniversary of Flesch’s famous book. We are hugely indebted to this great man. The question remains, how could this miscarriage of common sense take place in front of the whole world?

The war on reading was only a part of the bigger story that the Communist International, starting in 1919, declared war on the world. They didn't have a military in any sense but they had thousands of fanatics. These people took jobs throughout society, especially in media, education, foundations, cultural organizations. The grand strategy was one of constant but invisible war against all of bourgeois culture.

When I started studying education, I assure you it was all mysterious and spooky as it probably is for some of my readers now.

I spent decades not knowing what's going on. Why were the schools full of gimmicks that most students struggle with?

But finally, these fakers tell you phonics won’t work and they want to replace it with theories that every expert outside of the field of education will tell you cannot work.

We have to reclaim reading, real reading, if the country is to have a future.

If everyone would give this subject 10 or 20 minutes, they would understand the impossibility of sight-works. Introducing this hoax into K-12 was a fraud every bit as gargantuan as Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.

The pretenders in charge of literacy have been getting away with murder, almost literally. But I think the public knows something is seriously wrong with our schools. They are ready for reform, ready to reclaim what always worked. Pass this article on, especially to parents of young children.

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THE BIG PICTURE: In studying K-12, I thought for the first time I understood Communism. A quasi-religion that enshrines sophistry. Any lie is permitted, and any dirty trick. If they have to make the whole country illiterate, so what? Ends justify means.

The Education Establishment seems to be beyond shame. All they care about is winning. But what about our upscale people?? What about our best and brightest, why aren't they ashamed of allowing what is basically a gangster op to be in charge of our schools? The only hope is that people read an article like this and discuss it with their friends. When enough people reject the scam, we will have better schools.

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Bruce Deitrick Price is the author of Saving K-12 and The Education Enigma. His new novel is The Boy Who Saves The World (suspense, mystery, crime, intrigue, romance, AI).

(See Lit4u.com for info on all of his books.)