# Blumenfeld, "The New Illiterates and How to Keep Your Child from Becoming One" **URL:** **By** Donald Feder **Published:** May 1, 1975 --- “Dick and Jane, those denizens of the land of illiteracy, are doubtless two of the most heinous criminals of our century.” Dick and Jane, those denizens of the land of illiteracy, are doubtless two of the most heinous criminals of our century. The Bonnie and Clyde of reading instruction, they are responsible for depriving millions of the ability to comprehend even such mundane reading matter as newspapers and instruction manuals. For it was these smiling little moppets who taught Johnny not to read. If you think my indictment too strong, a brief survey of the sad state of literacy in America should confirm the charges. It has been estimated that half of our adult population is functionally illiterate. Each year our public schools send forth a body of graduates with poorer reading skills than their predecessors. A decade ago, the pedagogic horror story was of high school students who could not read, write, or spell. Today, many college students lack these basic skills of the educated mind. The _New Illiterates_ is a devastating assault on the cause of this epidemic of illiteracy, the look-say method of reading instruction. Our system of writing is based on the relationship between spoken words, composed of certain sounds, and the alphabetic letters and letter groupings (phonemes) by which those sounds are graphically represented. Rather than teaching children to read by instructing them in this sound-symbol relationship, look-say attempts to teach reading by the rote memorization of letter configurations. Look-say treats written words as if they were merely random assortments of lines and squiggles, each to be committed to memory like Chinese characters or hieroglyphics. This insidious form of reading pedagogy is also known as the whole-word method, because, instead of teaching the letters and phonemes of which words are composed, it presents whole words as irreducible units which must be learned in their entirety. As a method of reading instruction, look-say is an abject failure. It does, however, succeed admirably in confusing children and creating obstacles to their future reading development. The _New Illiterates_ takes the reader through a step-by-step analysis of the Dick and Jane primers, demonstrating their crippling effect on young minds, showing how they totally obscure the true nature of written words as sound symbols. Since memorizing whole words is extremely difficult, even for the brightest, the look-say primers use pictures and story lines as clues to word identification. Children learn to recognize a word (not to be confused with reading it) on the basis of the story context in which it appears or the picture used to illustrate it. Blumenfeld calls this method getting hooked on Dick and Jane. Understanding each book in the series depends on words memorized in preceding books. The child is taught a controlled vocabulary; he knows only the words he has memorized. When he encounters new words, in a context other than the primers, he is stymied, lacking the phonetic skills which would enable him to translate letters into sounds. Hence the high school student who can “read” only those words he memorized in third grade. Where did this pedagogic madness begin? Blumenfeld traces the historic development of look-say back to its nineteenth century origins—as a method of teaching the deaf! Ironically, look-say was eventually abandoned as being totally inadequate for the instruction of deaf children, only to be adopted by Progressive-school educators and enshrined in their temples of irrationality, the public schools. Libertarians will be particularly interested in Blumenfeld’s exposé of the public-education establishment, the dogmatic defender—and user—of look-say, despite all of the evidence of its disastrous effects. As a special bonus for parents, the book contains a phonetics primer for teaching reading in the home. The _New Illiterates_ should be of great interest to anyone concerned about the level of literacy in America. For parents who would spare their children the agony of a form of miseducation which can only be described as psychologic torture, this book is essential. Reviewed by Donald Feder / Education (358 pages) / LR Price $9.95