Teach Effectively!

I was working on another task today when I reviewed this quote:

Since I started to work with Johnny, I have looked into this whole reading buisness. I worked my way through a mountain of books and articles on the subject, I talked to dozens of people, and I spent many hours in classrooms, watching what was going on.

What I found is abolutely fantatstic. 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 ordiinary American school.

I think I first read this quote 30-some years ago. It’s hyperbolic now, to be sure, and I remember thinking that it was probably hyperbolic then. But I wonder how exaggerated it was when it was published in 1955.

By the way, the quote is from pages 1 and 2 of Why Johnny Can’t Read and What You Can do about It, written by Rudolf Flesch and published ini 1955 in New York by Harper & Brothers.