Dakota Beacon

Several years ago I had a website devoted to the importance of teaching kids how to read properly.  At the time I just figured that developing reading skills was something everyone could get behind, regardless of their own prejudices or beliefs about what works best in teaching reading.  Little did I know that this was not the case at all and never really was.  At least not within the context of public schools.  

First, let’s look at the history of reading skills in America.  The first white people to put down roots in America were the Pilgrims.  Why were they here?  I have often thought of the courage, commitment and faith of the people who said goodbye to everything in life they had ever known to take their families on this journey for freedom to worship, to an unknown wilderness with no return ticket.  But they so strongly believed that they did exactly this.  Part of what they believed was that everyone must read the Bible for himself, not take the words of a priest or scholar, but take individual responsibility to read and comprehend their Holy Book.  This meant that learning to read was mandatory.  This idea took root in America early.  For quite some time America had a very high rate of literacy.  

Now, here’s another story from our history, and one not so admirable.  During the colonial period and the early years of our independence, America had tolerated the institution of slavery.  Everyone knew it was bad and no one really knew how to go about ending it.  Some slave owners treated their slaves decently and others did not, but it was a universal condition that slaves were not taught to read.  They might even be harshly punished if it were learned that they had somehow conspired with someone to learn.  The obvious reason for this was to keep these people from learning anything that might disrupt their usefulness to their owners.  Reading was not required for the tasks they performed, and reading carried with it an implicit threat that if they were better informed they could organize against this awful system and free themselves in some way.  

So, on the one hand, reading was deemed essential in order to be free to follow God’s word, and then to go on to create and invent and do business of all kinds, and on the other, reading was considered too dangerous to allow slaves to learn.  This is the story of reading in America.  Until the late 19th Century, when the idea began to form that maybe ordinary, free Americans of any color should not be permitted to read, that the written word should, for them, be more or less restricted to a “need to know” basis.  So key words were taught - POISON,  DANGER, CLOCK, OPEN, PUSH, CLOSED, PAY HERE, etc.  Other words such as IMPONDERABLE, ACHIEVEMENT, ORGANIZATION, CONDITIONAL, DECISIVE, were of no value in a system which had devolved into nothing more than a means of training low-level workers.  In fact, true literacy was worse than of no value - it was seen as a negative by those elitists who had the influence or power to make the rules, or, in this case, set the curriculum.

We know this abuse and neglect as “See and Say”, or “Whole Word” methods of teaching reading.  My first encounter with this was as a child in third grade.  My brother was starting school and for him it was not the experience it was for our other brother and myself.  One brother and I had learned to read phonetically.  Our teacher (we had the same one) was only a few years below retirement age, so she, quite frankly, didn’t give a dam.  She knew how to do her job and she did it very well.  All of her students learned to read.  My younger brother had the misfortune to get someone else.  Now, my parents were not keeping up on trends in teaching reading - to them, everyone just went to school and learned.  They did.  So did everyone they knew.  They didn’t know that my brother and his classmates were lab rats in an experiment.  And the goal of the experiment was not how to teach reading better or more efficiently, it was to NOT teach reading and see whether they could get away with it on the taxpayer’s dime.  

I saw my brother, this really funny and talented kid, suffer - and I do mean “suffer” - under the tutelage of the monster hired to teach first grade.  She didn’t look like an innovator.  She had a puff of white hair, wore lace-up sensible shoes, and looked like Granny Whatsit. But the misery she inflicted on her students should have been punishable with a long prison sentence.  She intimidated our mother.  “Don’t try to help him at home,” she advised.  “We don’t teach that way anymore.”  And like so many other parents, my parents sat by and did nothing about the Master Plan that was being inflicted on my brother.   They were concerned, of course.  They knew he was at least as smart as his brother and sister were, they attended parent/teacher conferences.  But they did not push back against what was going on in that school.  They thought it was just the teacher.  And I was in the third grade.  At those ages, kids don’t want their siblings a couple of years older telling them what to do, even if they knew what to do.  So my brother was stuck.  He was smart enough to eventually teach himself to read, but most kids are not that smart.  

I saw the school grind him up, though, making him hate books at the time, (he’s good friends with them now!), making his life an unending misery.  He learned to hate school.  When my sisters came along (by then I was in my teens) I vowed that they would not start school without knowing how to read.  I had read Rudolf Fleisch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read . . . and What You Can Do About It.  I was fascinated - this weird little book with its two titles lived up to both.  I was outraged and saddened by the history of the fake reading program imposed on American kids, and thoroughly disgusted.  The second part of the book provided a formula for teaching kids how to read properly - that is to say, phonetically.

I taught my younger sisters (with some support from my aunt) and they became avid readers.  One was highly creative, an accomplished equestrienne, painted, was an amazing photographer, wrote mystery stories and became a television news producer, winning two international awards for her work in her all-too-brief career.  She was mostly self-taught in everything she did.  Another became a Latin scholar, musician, was offered four scholarships to law school and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa.  She was home schooled through high school.  The third has written books about the other two, has an encyclopedic knowledge of music, art and politics.  Another home-schooled and unschooled example.  They were all avid readers with insight and comprehension.  Not at all because of “me”, but entirely because they were freed to learn.  Meanwhile, my brother undertook to figure it all out for himself, and I think Nancy Drew was his best teacher.  

Flesch’s landmark book is still worth reading and still as current and relevant as it was in the 1960s.  I would invite everyone who cares about America’s future or their own children to read it.  

When my own kids came along, my husband and I decided to home school them (or perhaps “unschool” them) and allow them to learn.  And so they did.  They explored different pathways, depending upon their individual interests and talents, music, writing and reading being common to them all.  Their dad found a great system in Samuel Applebaum’s “AlphaPhonics” book and we used McGuffy’s Readers (these, too, should be read by parents just to see how far our education system has allowed our kids to free fall).  McGuffy’s books date back to the late 19th Century.  Some parents discovered products like “Hooked on Phonics” which offered basically the same fool-proof approach.  

Only now do I fully realize the evil behind the failure (is it “failure” when this is the intended result?) of America’s so-called institutions of learning to teach our kids basic reading skills.   In fact, this attack on our kids' literacy is what I’d term a Fabian sort of plot.  Elitists don’t want the general public to be able to read - or much less, write!  That would inevitably lead to the kind of thinking which drove our Revolution in 1775.  People reading pamphlets, writing letters, circulating books and newspapers - communicating ideas.  The elitists want to have a corner on all ideas.  The poor slobs on the bottom don’t need ideas - they just need to keep their heads down and do their menial jobs.  (No need for skilled or knowledgeable employees - they can be imported on a temporary basis from India and China through H-1B.)  This “freedom” stuff is for the ones on the top, the wealthy, the elite.  You and I don’t need to know what John Locke wrote, or what our Constitution says, or, for that matter, various versions of world history.  We need to be able to read exit signs, line-forms-here signs, and until recently, signs designating some rooms for “women” and others for “men”.  Now, even in places where it still matters, we see little paper cut-out looking figures depicting “men” and “women” differing by the little triangular “skirt” on the latter.  So you don’t even need to read that.  

While the current generation is watching TikTok or taking selfies or playing video games, the younger people of other advanced nations are gaining the upper hand economically and our own country is suffering in every way.  Americans need to wake up and take note of what is going on and who is orchestrating it.  None of this is accidental.  This “technology” that we are told to worship at the expense of common sense is a tool.  Look at one of the most popular programs - “Grammarly”.  This wonderful little app will not just clean up your minor errors, put commas and semi-colons in the right places and check your spelling.  It will rephrase your sentences.  It will make them “better”, more “professional”.  It will re-write what you tried to write.  In the end, Grammarly just wrote your paper, your report, maybe your book or article.  And students and parents think this is a great help.  It is helping its users to dependency and basic illiteracy.  Now there are new apps.  The new ones make you totally dispensable in the classroom.  These will take notes FOR you, not just clean up YOUR notes.  If you happen to “zone out” while your professor is lecturing, no worries.  Your app will kick in and do all the learning for you.  Then it can get together with Grammarly to do the rest.  It is wonderful.  All that is left for the student to do now, is pay the school loans off for the rest of his life for his apps’ education.  And what use he will be in the workforce is anyone’s guess.  It’s good we have H-1B.

And here’s Nightmare No. 2:  We are seeing the same abuse in the area of math.  Most likely, the best thing we can ever do for our children is to keep them away from school and pay attention to their education.

In 1916, Irish patriot, scholar and martyr, Patrick Pearse, published a pamphlet entitled “The Murder Machine”.  In this work he explained how the British used the public schools in occupied Ireland to render the Irish a barely functional class of people and he made suggestions to his people as to how to counter this.  That was 100 years ago in Ireland and it was the same story, except that Ireland was then occupied by the British.  We don’t have the same excuse here.

I could go on - I have before - about the reasons behind this (and I think they are the same as the reason the elite in both parties want to keep our border open - namely, to re-institute a slave class) but I don’t need to.  There is help available, at least for those who want it, and some insight and a lot of truly fascinating research about the politics of this phenomenon as well as scientific studies of how different methods of “teaching reading” are received by the human brain.  Every bit of it is worth hearing.  I strongly suggest you watch the video linked right here.

There are other issues involved with this also - social unrest, misbehavior in school and elsewhere, violent behavior, amazing levels of ADHD diagnoses and inevitable prescribing of psychotropic drugs.  And I had an interesting conversation with a former social worker who confirmed my own suspicion about homelessness - much of it is related to drug use.  Her insight was this:  kids are prescribed psychotropic and anti-depressant drugs from very early ages, grow up on these drugs, supplied in schools and through “programs”, and once they graduate from high school this constant supply of drugs stops short.  They crave the effects of the drugs that they have become accustomed to (should we just say “addicted to”?) and they turn to the available alternative - street drugs.  And all of this eventually leads to many different kinds and levels of crimes.  Authorities never admit this or look at these factors honestly when there is a tragic incident such as a school shooting or stabbing, etc., but rather blame the weapon used.  As Robert Kennedy, Jr., pointed out, in the era of his teenage years, high school kids formed shooting clubs, they owned and took care of their own guns, they sometimes hunted or did target shooting.  It was normal.  One doctor has testified that when he was in high school (in Louisiana) everyone had a gun mounted inside the rear window.  In those days no one ever even thought of mass shootings in schools, malls, churches or movie theaters.  It just did not happen.  The weapons were there.  The remedial drugs were not.  But this is a topic to follow further on another day.  Just take a look at the video linked above.  And let me know what you think.  I really want to know.