Rudolph Flesch was a graduate of Teachers College and an authority on both reading and writing. He was himself an educator and, you might think, an insider. Nonetheless, he spent much of his life in a frustrating quest to persuade his colleagues that they had made a tragic mistake by favoring look-say over phonics. His “Why Johnny Can't Read” was a national bestseller in 1956. But the education establishment vilified him and ignored him.

Flesch waited 25 years and tried again with “Why Johnny Still Can't Read.” Again it was a bestseller. Again the educational establishment snickered; and his earnest, heartfelt effort could not overcome their hostility. He died believing that the situation might be hopeless. This tribute will consist of trying to answer a question: why did Rudolph Flesch have to waste so much of his life defending the obvious?

I've read his books and many others dealing with the same topics and I kept asking: what is REALLY going on here? Phonics has to be a part of any reading program, right? Isn't it the simplest way to figure out a word you don't know? Why do his opponents keep pushing ideas that don't work? All they have to do is read Rudolph Flesch. Two bestsellers! Surely everyone has heard of these wonderful books.

Flesch discusses British schools, where it is normal for children to learn to read by Christmas of their first grade. Once they grasp the phonetic code, they can read anything, at age seven. Children forced into look-say (or whole word) classes learn English as if each word were a Chinese ideogram. This approach is slow and inefficient. Typically, kids can memorize about 800 "sight words" a year. Even by the sixth grade, so-called A-students could be expected to know only 5000 words. With this limited vocabulary, there is no newspaper or cereal box that they can read even half of, at age twelve. Worse still, children that age have more than 30,000 words buzzing around in their heads. They speak most of these words, and recognize all of them in conversation. They just can't recognize them in print. Imagine the imprisonment and torture we are describing here. Your ears and your brain know 30,000 words, but your eyes know only 5000. You can get a migraine just thinking about this. By the end of high school an outstanding look-say student might know 10,000 words on sight, but by that time the volume of heard or recognized words has probably grown past 50,000. The victim of this abuse will be semiliterate for life. The victim will not be able to read for pleasure.

It's difficult for an adult to identify with what a child goes through in look-say. Here are some simple ways to do this. Go on Google and find some pages in a foreign language you don't know. Or turn a page of English upside down and look at it in a mirror. Now imagine you are told to memorize all those words by SHAPE alone. (Note that you will eventually need to memorize several shapes for every word: “teachings,” "Teachings," “TEACHINGS,” and versions in hand writing or odd typefaces.) In all cases, you must NOT break words into letters or syllables. You must NOT sound out the words. Just memorize the shapes-- that is, the design, the look, the appearance. Feeling dyslexic, are you? Feeling depressed and anxious? ADD coming on? Yes, that happens a lot.

Here is the fundamental point: Words learned phonetically will always re-introduce themselves to you, a thousand times if necessary. Each word contains its own speech chip, so to speak. The word talks to you, "Here's how you pronounce me!" But a word learned as an ideogram is static and uncommunicative. Either you have memorized it or you haven't, much like a house, car or other object seen as you drive through a neighborhood. Do you know that house or don't you? The house doesn't say, not a peep. It's up to you to recall the shape of the roof, the color of the garage, etc. (Imagine the nightmare of trying to memorize thousands of houses by name.) For children caught in look-say, English looks like this: htchfgd fhwtrg dsphw mjl bqv xtpkng... There's thousands upon thousands of small, strange, silent shapes to memorize. And they're coming at you very fast as you try to read across the page.

Only the smartest Chinese can learn even 20,000 of their ideograms (which have only one shape and often contain a pictographic element). Even this amount requires excellent memory, great discipline, and endless practice drawing these symbols. Modern educators routinely condemn practice and memorization; how odd that they selected a reading pedagogy that demands both. English now hurtles toward a total vocabulary of 1,000,000 words. Look-say was never a feasible way to deal with this Niagara of symbols. Memorizing short, common words (house, stop, good, but, they, what) may not be too bad at first. Children might learn one or two thousand such words and get A's in third and fourth grade reading. (Provided, of course, they are reading books written in this controlled vocabulary--so the A's are quite dishonest.) But progress will now come more slowly because the children will have to move on to bigger, more visually cumbersome words (bathroom, apartment, however, television, somewhere). Their brains will struggle to remember the tiny visual differences between, for example, virtue, virtual, visit, vertigo, vision, verse, visible, vista, version, visa, visiting, virgin, visual. (What mnemonic tricks would you use to remember that “virtue” has something to do with morality but “virtual” has something to do with computers? Would those tricks work a month later? Could you transfer those memory tricks to VIRTUE and VIRTUAL?) Still more bad news: Once children learn to sight-read a few thousand words, their brains resist phonics. If these children try to read some words phonetically, well, they can't, not easily. It hurts. Their brains have become wired for shapes, not sounds. These children will say they hate reading. Teachers will start calling them dyslexic.

According to Flesch, we are wired to talk by age three, write by age five, and read by age seven, roughly speaking. These things happen naturally, with time and encouragement. Learning to talk, he notes, is a far greater intellectual leap than learning to read. But what do you know-- three-year-olds do it. Similarly, seven-year-olds will almost universally learn to read, if you don't put obstacles in their way. An inability to read is rare among humans; you would expect to find actual brain damage. The evil genius of look-say is that it creates the symptoms of brain damage in healthy children. Here's a grim but probably accurate thought. If our educators were teaching children to talk, we would have a society overflowing with mutes. As it is, we have a society overflowing with "functional illiterates."

Frank Smith, whom many educators regard as a great expert on reading, did more than anyone else to perpetuate the war against phonics and against Rudolph Flesch. Smith states flatly: “Readers do not need the alphabet.” He ridicules phonics (“the 166 rules and 45 exceptions,” as he puts it). Smith likes to pretend that young children are empty-headed and will be sounding out exotic words they do not know. But that's a phony set-up. Kids in first grade already know more than 20,000 words. They need help ASAP in recognizing the printed version of all these words. Smith himself gave the game away when he wrote, as a put-down: “Phonics works if you know what a word is likely to be in the first place.” Yes, and that can be a big help--just what the child needs to keep going. Suppose the story is about a farm; there are chickens, mules, ducks, cows, pigs, turkeys, horses and a rooster there. The child knows all those words; with just a hint of the starting sound, the child reads all those words. Call phonics one of the great inventions of human history. Or call it a code-breaker, a crutch, a trick, a cheat sheet. It lets children read all those thousands of fairly complex words they speak in conversation by age five, but with look-say will not be able to read until they are in high school, if ever. Words such as hurricane, internet, digital, vacation, interstate, Mercedes, crocodile, computing, cheerleader, quarterback, aspirin, battery, janitor, detergent, headquarters, electricity, military, Manhattan, athletic, chemistry, understand, groceries, religion, Hollywood, etc., etc.

My guess is that children don't need a lot of phonics to get started. (I say this knowing that Dr. Flesch would disagree. I say this because I somehow graduated from college and became an author without learning even a single phonics rule. I think that what happened was that I was in look-say classes but the teacher was teaching some informal phonics on the side! Fortunately. Indeed, it's one of my favorite theories that a LOT of guerrilla teaching occurred in this country. Otherwise, the look-say disaster would be much worse than it is.) At most (and this is just my impression), young children need one consonant sound plus the long and short vowel sounds. But here's what they absolutely have to know: the alphabetic concept by which letters can stand for sounds. And it's this great cultural treasure that look-say was designed to keep forever hidden. Judging by everything I've read, look-say is the worst possible way to teach reading. Whenever it's used, literacy declines. Weird reading problems proliferate. Look-say (or whole word) is arguably a form of child abuse.

What, by the way, is the best way to teach reading? I suspect it's the same way we teach tying shoelaces, cooking, using a computer, and all the rest. An adult sits by the child and helps the child along. Children love stories and they love repetition. So there's plenty of opportunity to point at letters, syllables and words, to repeat sounds, to enjoy rhyme, and to discuss what a wonderful but sometimes whacky thing the English language is. I also suspect that poetry--anything with rhyme, including nursery rhymes and doggerel--should be central.

Well, this debate has been played out in many books and throughout the country. At this date, 20 years after Dr. Flesch passed away, his message largely prevails. The forces of whole word--especially since 1995--are slowly receding, like some dark tide. But we are still left, ever more intriguingly, with the question: why did this bogus technique come into vogue in the first place? To find the answer, we have to peer back at the history of education, all the way to the early part of the 20th century and into the late 19th century. Two entirely new fields were born at that time, Education and Psychology; the same small group dominated both. What were the motives and goals of these willful men, the ones who perpetrated look-say and so many other dubious strategies? For many years I simply could not figure it out. Why were American educators so incurably drawn to bad ideas? I kept hoping there was a benign explanation. Then I began suspecting that these people were either the biggest bunglers in history or huge criminals. But which? And why? For a long time, American educational theory and practice seemed to me like a bizarre mystery story.