http://www.americanthinker.com/articles ... ko.twitter
Samuel Blumenfeld (1927-2015) is one of the few really great educators that this country has had. He wrote twelve books and hundreds of articles explaining the country's educational decline. He was an expert on reading and phonics.
If Blumenfeld had a flaw, it was that he generally published articles that were longer than most people wanted to deal with. So his great wisdom did not reach the influence it deserved.
For one very good example, he wrote a terrifying 3,200-word article telling this country just about everything there is to know about dyslexia. The sardonic title was "Creating Dyslexia: It's as Easy as Pie."
Every parent, every teacher, and everyone connected with education should know what Blumenfeld has to say. To make that easy, here are the most important paragraphs in this article:
This issue of setting children off on the wrong trajectory, or reading reflex, is also why there are inherent dangers in the 'multi-cueing reading strategies' when these amount to using various cues to guess the words in place of studying the printed words and accurately decoding them.By teaching this five-year-old child a sight vocabulary before he could master the letter sounds, he was being put on the road to dyslexia. This is particularly harmful because the child's brain at that early age is still in the process of organizing its patterns of thinking, its cerebral habits, habits that are very difficult to unlearn later in life. That accounts for the great difficulty dyslexics as they grow older and their thinking patterns become more firmly established. It is possible that the brain can be permanently deformed by early development of thinking patterns based on faulty teaching methods.
('Multi-cueing guessing strategies' such as, guessing the word or words from word 'shape', from the pictures, the first letter or letters of a word, the 'context' therefore encouraging children to guess 'what would make sense' in place of studying the actual word accurately.)