The teaching of reading, of course, is central to all of education. And that we should even have to discuss something as mundane as this really is amazing in this day and age. But it's a symptom of how bad things have become that we have to discuss teaching the ABCs to children these days. Because the schools have done such an incredibly horrible job. But as I pointed out last night in my speech, The aim of the public school is to dumb down the American people, to lower the literacy levels of the country. And the way they chose to do that was to, by putting in a new method of teaching reading, that would of course make it impossible for anyone to become a proficient reader. And as I stated, what the professors of education did was throw out the alphabetic phonics method, which is the proper way you teach an alphabetic writing system and then they substituted a new method called the look say or whole word or sight method which teaches children to read English as if it were an idiographic writing system like the Chinese. Now if you don't know the difference between the two let me explain. Ours is an alphabetic writing system. What is an alphabet? An alphabet is a set of symbols of graphic symbols we call them letters that stand for the irreducible speech sounds of the language. Every alphabet is based on that same principle, whether it's the Cyrillic alphabet, which the Russians use, or the Hebrew alphabet, or the Armenian alphabet. All alphabets have that in common. All of their letters stand for speech sounds, irreducible speech sounds. Now, the alphabet was invented around 2,000 years BC. Now, when you teach in a child to read alphabetically, what must you do? You must teach the child the letters, to recognize the letters, and then you proceed to teach the sounds that the letters stand for, and you can teach them in any number of ways, but the most important thing that you try to do, that you must do in fact, is have the child associate the letter with the sound. That's the proper association. And you can do it through any number of types of drills. In the old days, for example, what they did was They'd take, for example, the letter B. The irreducible sound is buh. That's what the B stands for, buh. That's what it means. And then they would combine the letter with consonants so that they might have columns of consonants and vowels so that you'd be reading bay, bee, bi, bo, boo, ba, ba, bi, ba, bum, may, me, my, mo, moo, man, man, man, my, muh, that kind of thing. And the child would be drilled In that, and before you knew it, the child would soon be able to read two-letter combinations, three-letter combinations, and they'd be reading words and then multi-syllabic words. Very simple system to teach. That's the system that has been used throughout history since the alphabet was invented. Now, what were the writing systems used before the alphabet was invented? Well, the earliest is known as pictography. This morning I I mentioned how the psychologists have decided that we've got to begin teaching children to read by having them go through all of the stages of man's development. Ontogeny and phylogeny. And so they start with pictography. What is pictography? Well, you know, the cavemen drew pictures on the walls of their caves. You didn't have to go to school to learn to read pictography. An animal looked like an animal, a human being looked like a human being, a bow and arrow looked like a bow and arrow. Well, as civilization became more complex, the scribes had to invent pictures of things, or they had to symbolize things which could not, did not lend themselves to depiction. For example, how would you draw a picture of possible, or accept, or in, out? up, down, perceive, legal. I mean, there are so many different concepts that we use that do not lend themselves to depiction, yet they had to invent little symbols, little pictures for them. And so what they would do is create a little symbol to stand for that particular idea. And the result was a system of writing known as ideographs. Well, the little graphic images of ideas, ideographs. The Chinese system is an ideographic writing system. Egyptian hieroglyphics was an ideographic writing system. In other words, you have thousands and thousands of little symbols that do not look like anything they represent. So how do you learn to read such a system? Well, somebody's got to tell you what all these different symbols mean. And of course, it's not a very accurate writing system. Because, first of all, you rely completely on memory to memorize thousands of little symbols, and that's pretty impossible to do. Now, we use ideographs today in America, and we're using them more and more. For example, you know the very familiar sign, the circle with a cigarette in it and a slash through it. Now, you look at that sign and you say, oh, no smoking. Or if a Frenchman sees it, he says, oh, des fonces fumées. or thou shalt not smoke, or nicht rauchen, or no fumar. In other words, language is used to interpret the symbol. And you can interpret in any way you like. So the symbol is not an accurate reproduction of the spoken language. It's just the idea flashed before you, and you can use any kind of language to interpret that symbol to you. Now we use these symbols a great deal in airports. international airports because they expected a lot of foreigners will be passing through who can't speak English and so they use all of these signs but usually they combine them with with alphabetic writing to be sure so that people will be sure what the what that little symbol says for example you often see the when you want to go to the restroom you've got to look for the picture of the if you're a male the picture of the person in pants rather than the little picture of somebody in a skirt. Now, if there was no alphabetic writing underneath that saying men and women, a lady wearing pants might go into the room with a little picture of somebody in pants. After all, women wear pants these days. In other words, sometimes it's a little ambiguous. I remember recently in North Carolina, traveling on a road, we came to a sign, a circle, with a question mark in it. I wonder what in blazes does that mean? I thought maybe it was asking, do you know where you're going? But there was a little arrow pointing to the left right under that sign and I looked hurriedly to my left as we were traveling down the road and I noticed that there was an information booth for tourists. So that's what that means. But if somebody didn't tell you that, I mean, it would have been simple had they said, information for tourists, you know, you would have known. But that's the kind of thing. And that's the wave of the future. You see, as fewer and fewer people can read alphabetic writing, more and more of these little ideographs are appearing all over the country. I stopped at one airport which had no alphabetic writing at all in designating the public services. So when I got off the plane and wanted to look for baggage claim, there was no sign that said baggage claim, but there was a picture of a bag. So I followed the picture and of course it led me there. But then when returning to the airport, to leave, incidentally that was Little Rock, Arkansas, to leave Little Rock, I was looking for the sign that said arrivals and departures. You know, you want to go to the right place. There were no such signs. What they did was they had two pictures. One picture showed a plane going up, and one picture showed a plane going down. Well, you have to think fast, you know, which is which, and if you're not that kind of visual thinker, you're liable to miss it and go up the wrong ramp, or down the wrong ramp, whatever the case is. In any case, ideographic writing was the method used until about 2000 BC when somebody made a remarkable discovery. Somebody discovered that all of human language is composed of a small number of irreducible speech sounds. For example, how many irreducible speech sounds do you think there are in the English language? I mean, we have a vocabulary upward of a million words. How many irreducible speech sounds are there in English? Any volunteers? Yes. No? A little high. How many? Back there. What was it? 30? No. 44, right. There are only 44 sounds in the English language. And so this individual who made this remarkable discovery said, well, instead of using this cumbersome, horrible system of thousands and thousands of symbols to learn to read, and incidentally the Chinese have 50,000 of those little pictures. He said, why not invent a set of symbols or create a set of symbols to stand for the speech sounds, the irreducible speech sounds, and then we will be able to transcribe the spoken word directly into written form and easily translate it back into spoken form. And thus the alphabet was invented. Now something else happened as soon as the alphabet was invented. Something very crucial to man's spiritual development. The scripture appears. You see, man had to wait until the alphabet was invented before God's word could be put on paper. Why? Because God doesn't communicate with us through pictures. God does not send us comic books. God communicates to us through the word. As a matter of fact, it even says in John, in the beginning was the word, And the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Isn't it interesting, the equating of the Word with God? And man had to wait until the alphabet was invented before the Word of God could be put on paper. And God could communicate directly with man, because how does God communicate with man? Through the Word. And how does man communicate with God? Through the spoken Word also, through prayer. So it was considered by the Hebrews the invention of the alphabet as of divine origin. And you can see why, because without the alphabet they couldn't have put down the Ten Commandments. Now the interesting thing about the alphabet is that it permits man to transcribe the spoken word with precision. Precision, that's the important term there. And Dr. Rush, Rush Dooney mentioned last night how everything is getting imprecise. How the education system is not even, is telling children that dates are not important anymore. So the alphabet and precision are very close to accuracy. Is that the exclusive feature of alphabetic writing? And that's why we, you know, when we refer to the Bible as the Word of God, and we refer to the inerrancy of Scripture, we're referring to a precise translation or a precise transcription of God's Word, which is impossible to do with pictures or pictographs. You can't do it. Now, I have not read the Chinese translation of the Bible, but I'm sure it It's a great problem trying to translate it into Chinese. In any case, alphabetic writing immediately swept away hieroglyphics. Now, alphabetic writing apparently didn't reach the Far East because the Chinese continued to use their ideographic writing system. Well now, as I explained to you, how do we teach an alphabetic writing system? Very simply, we teach the child the letters of the alphabet, the sounds that the letters stand for. And before you know it, the child can read anything. You don't need pictures. You don't need games. You don't need anything. And children learn very quickly, you see. Now, when the progressives took over public education or education in general at the turn of the century, and they decided to dumb down the American people, it is interesting that the method they chose was teaching children to read English as if it were a hieroglyphic or an ideographic system. What they did was this. They said, we will no longer teach children the letters of the alphabet and the sounds they stand for. We will have children look at whole words and have them look at each whole word as a little picture. We will put a little frame around it and have the child look at that whole word as a little picture in a frame and expect the child to remember what that word says. Now, of course, it's very difficult for a child to look at a whole word without knowing the letters and to know what that word says. The only way he can know is if somebody tells him. That's why children today can't read words that they have not seen before, many children. You see, because they have no way of figuring them out. Well, you might say that, yes, but don't they teach some phonics? Yes, they do, but they do it piecemeal. What they do is they teach the child to recognize first the whole word through its configuration, in conjunction with pictures. Children are taught to read pictures. For example, you'll have the early books, as you've seen any of today's basal readers that they use in the public schools, they will have lavish, beautifully illustrated books, a couple of words at the bottom of the page, three words, but a big beautiful picture, then another big picture with three words, then another big picture, and what the child is doing is looking at the picture, you see, and of course the teacher is telling him, what those words are, and sometimes they will have books with words and pictures. The word and the picture right on the side by side so that the child will know what that word stands for. Then what they do is they put the word in context. Let's take for example the word horse, H-O-R-S-E. The word horse does not look like a horse, does it? So how does a child get to see a horse in H-O-R-S-E? You know how? Any way he can. any way he can. If he can see a horse in that word, that's great. Now the big professors of education will tell you that if that child sees H-O-R-S-E and says pony, that's correct. Because the child is seeing the picture, he's seeing something galloping. If he said mule, perhaps that wouldn't be quite as correct as pony. But the point I want to make is that it produces inaccurate readers. It produces guessers, word guessers, not word readers. And that's why we call it the look and guess system rather than the look say system. Now, but that's the way they teach the children to read. And now, then you can understand when you analyze that method. And incidentally, in my book, The New Illiterates, I analyze the Dick and Jane readers very closely. And I came to the conclusion that any child taught to read by that method would exhibit the symptoms of dyslexia. Now, what are the symptoms of dyslexia? Well, they tell you the symptoms are that children reverse letters. Well, wouldn't you reverse letters if you had to try to learn, I mean, a word just by the whole? Because why make a fuss over the correct sequence of letters? You see, when you're taught to read phonetically, the sequence of the letters follows the sequence in which the sounds are uttered. But if you don't know what sounds the letters stand for, why make such a fuss over the proper sequence of the letters? That's why, look, say, readers become such poor spellers, and that they reverse letters, they see words backwards, they read words backwards. Why shouldn't they? I mean, when you look at a picture, do you look at it from left to right? or from right to left. You look at it in any way you want. You look at a picture, it looks, you know, whatever attracts you. That's what you do when you look at a picture. So if you're trying to look at an alphabetic word as a little picture, you're going to see all kinds of crazy things in it. Now, of course, what it does produce is reading disability. It produces reading disability. The professors know this. They've known it from the very beginning because if you read their literature, if you read the first book written on the subject in 1908 or 1909 written by Dr. Edmund Burke Hewey, his book is entitled The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading. In that book he states how wonderful this new look-say method is. And he says, yes, we are teaching children to read English as if it were Chinese. He says, but that's okay. He says, eventually they'll straighten themselves out. He says, yes, the kids make mistakes, but they're getting the meaning. They're getting the meaning. And what they mean by that is that when you see any ideograph, what you do is you get a direct meaning. For example, when you see that sign with the cigarette in the middle of it, you see it flash by, And through your mind goes the idea, no smoking. Or you could say, oh, I can't light up. Or, gee, this is a non-smoking area. In other words, the ideas flash to you immediately. The meaning comes to you immediately. But alphabetic, but when you read alphabetic writing, your mind goes through two steps. The first step is decoding the written message. What you do is you see letters that stand for sounds that evokes the spoken word, and it's the spoken word that refers to the meaning, you see. So there's quite a difference between the two methods. But to prove to you that this method causes reading disability and that the professors knew about it way back, the new books were launched in the schools or put in the schools around the early 1930s, the Dick and Jane books and the Macmillan Readers. Prior to that, in 1929, the professors were warned that this new method of teaching reading would cause reading disability. Who warned them? A doctor by the name of Samuel T. Orton, a neuropathologist at the State University of Iowa, or Iowa State University. Now Orton, at that time, was dealing with children who were having reading problems. They were coming to him in that particular area because I suppose they were testing the new teaching method in Iowa. And he was finding all of these children were having terrible problems learning to read. And after diagnosing them, he came to the conclusion that the reason why they are having all of these problems was because of the way they were being taught. And so he wrote an article that was published in the February 1929 issue of the Journal of Educational Psychology. And this is what Dr. Orton, and this is the title of the article, The Sight-Reading Method of Teaching Reading as a Source of Reading Disability. That's 1929. And this is what Dr. Orton wrote. He said, I wish to emphasize at the beginning that the strictures which I have to offer here do not apply to the use of the sight method of teaching reading as a whole, but only to its effects on a restricted group of children for whom, as I think we can show, This technique is not only not adapted, but often proves an actual obstacle to reading progress. And moreover, I believe that this group is one of considerable size. Well, he was dealing with a rather small sample. But today we know that that considerable size means one third of the total student population. And I had that confirmed to me the other day when I was in Selma, California. I visited Peggy Adams, the principal of the Washington elementary school there. Now, she has been using, for the last five years, Sue Dixon's Thing, Spell, Read and Write program, which is now being promoted by CBN University. But she had found it through a catalog of reading programs. In any case, she told me that when she graduated from Teachers College in California, she was told by her professors to expect that one third of the students would not learn to read. would not be able to learn to read. She was told that that was normal, to expect it, not to worry about it, and just to go about her business. She was also told that the second third would get by, and only one third of the students would become proficient readers. Now, of course, when she began teaching and she saw all of these poor children failing, she thought to herself, there must be a better way to do this. And in the course of her searches, She came across this Sing Spell program in a catalog, ordered it, and what do you know? All the children learned to read. So she realized that she had been deceived by the professors. But that's what they tell the teachers, you see. They tell them that expect one third to fail. So you're dealing with millions and millions of children. Three million children enter kindergarten or over the first grade every year in America. One third of them, one million, are destined to become functional illiterates. To become intellectual cripples. And this is all done deliberately with the full knowledge of the professors of education. Full knowledge. They know exactly what they are doing. And they will fight tooth and nail to keep that system in the schools. Why? Because if you change that, then you're no longer teaching children as if they are animals. You're going to start to teach them as if they're human beings, and they'll learn how to read, and you're going to upset that whole program that I outlined last night to change America into a socialist, atheist nation. Now the interesting thing here is that the changeover to hieroglyphics, to images, to ideographs, is concurrent with the changeover to paganism. Because remember, we associate ideographs, hieroglyphics, with paganism, with idolatry. And since the alphabetic writing system is so completely, so closely associated with the scripture, that what better way can you have of breaking the child's link with God by breaking or destroying his ability to read God's Word, and having him rely on images, and on ideographs and on hieroglyphics, you see. Very clever, these men. You're not dealing with dummies. You're dealing with diabolically inspired individuals of great intelligence. Remember, these are the men giving PhDs to everyone else in America. They're not dummies. I remember when Rudolf Flesch wrote his book, Why Johnny Can't Read, in 1955. and revealed for the first time why Johnny was having all this trouble reading. He said there's nothing wrong with the children, they haven't suddenly come down with all these learning disabilities. He said it was the teaching method that was at fault. He concluded that the professors were stupid, that's why they were doing this. I thought so too for a while, but they were anything but stupid. Then of course, when I did my analysis of the Dick and Jane books, in the new illiterates, I thought, well, perhaps it's greed that is the motive behind what they're doing, because they're not stupid men, but they're making an awful lot of money with these books. You see, because you can teach phonics with a little book like this. This is my own book. Cost $20, and that's all you need. One little book, and you teach everybody to read with this. Doesn't have any pictures, no color, nothing. But to teach, look, say, to create a functional illiterate, you need a whole set of books. You see, because they lock you into a site vocabulary at the very beginning, you learn a set of site words which are then built upon in the subsequent books. And so you must buy a whole set of books beginning with the first grade and going to the sixth grade. So Scott Forsman is, you know, they were delighted by this new method of teaching because instead of just teaching one, selling one book, you sold a whole slew of books. Very expensive for the taxpayer, very lucrative for the publishers and for the writers, for the professors. I mean, they must have laughed all the way to the bank with their satchels of royalty money from Dick and Jane alone, my God, which was probably in every schoolhouse in America. But in any case, the art of creating functional illiterates has now been developed to a very fine state in America. You see, it's not easy to keep a child for 12 years in a school and make sure that he doesn't learn to read. It's not easy. You must sympathize with these poor teachers and professors who has to keep a child in school for 12 years and make sure that he comes out functionally illiterate. It's not easy. You have to be specially trained to do it. You've got to use special books to do it. And then you've got to have the medical profession on your side that says, oh yes, there's something wrong with the child. Well, you know what happens with these children. Let me give you an example. This morning I pointed out how Dr. Dearborn had equated, he said, that they were using the Pavlovian technique to teach children to read? Well, what was he telling us? He was telling us that we teach children to read as if they're little animals, right? Well, but there's a difference between an animal and a child. After all, let us assume that a dog goes to school. What can he say when he enters the first grade? Arf arf, right? Now, let us assume that that dog is socially promoted through to the 12th grade and then you know, holds out his paw for his diploma at the end of 12 years, what can that dog say? Arf arf, right? He has developed his auditory and verbal skills to such a high degree that he has a speaking vocabulary between 5,000 and 35,000 words. Now any child who can teach himself to speak his own language all by himself is certainly very learning able. Wouldn't you agree? Very learning able. And remember, that child did it alone, without the help of Sesame Street, without the help of Frosted Flakes. Nobody had to bribe the child to learn to speak. Isn't that interesting? You don't have to bribe children to learn to speak. You don't have to drag them into a place between nine and three and have them learn to speak. They learn on their own all the time. So they're very learning able. But let us assume, for example, that our little Johnny, who is now six-year-old, is ready to enter the first grade, and he is going to be taught to read by the sight method. And let us assume that he is one of the one-third destined to fail, as Dr. Orton pointed out. So he goes and he enters the first grade, and this is what he's taught to read. Dick. Look, Jane. Look, look. See Dick. See, see. Oh, see. See Dick. Oh, see Dick. Oh, oh, oh. Funny, funny Dick. And that child sits there. And he says to himself, gee, either I'm crazy or she's crazy. I mean, This isn't the way people talk. Now, that child should know, after all, he's taught himself to speak his own language. He can rattle away at the dinner table. Very articulate. Terrific vocabulary. And here he is in this school, so he says to himself, well, this school must be a weird place. But Mother has told me to behave myself and to be good and do what the teacher says, so I'll try my best. Johnny is one of those who can't hack it. Perhaps his visual skills are not as highly developed as his auditory or verbal skills. He doesn't have a photographic memory, so he's going to find it very hard to learn a sight vocabulary. So at the end of the first year, mother is called to school and told by the teacher, Mrs. Jones, Johnny has a reading problem. Well, you see, and she also tells mother that Johnny's going to have to stay back a year. Well, you can imagine what this does to Johnny's self-esteem. He begins to think, well, maybe I'm not as intelligent as I thought I was. You see, children feel very intelligent at the age of five after having mastered their own language. Do you realize what an incredible feat that is for a little young child to be able to do that? And now they're told that there's something wrong with them. So Johnny begins to feel, well, maybe I'm dumb. And then at the end of the second year, things don't get any better. Mother is called to school again and told, Mrs. Jones, Johnny has a learning disability. Johnny is dyslexic. He'll have to go into special ed. By now, mother is frantic. She goes to psychiatrists, psychologists. The child is tested and retested. And they can't, they don't know what's wrong with Johnny. You see, they know something is wrong with Johnny. And mother thinks that she's given birth to a defective child. I don't know how many times I've been approached by parents who tell me the same story. And then after that, by the end of the third year, Johnny is swinging from the rafters. He's become a behavioral problem. And mother is summoned to school again until Mrs. Jones, Johnny may have minimal brain damage. And if Johnny is to remain in school, he's going to have to take medication. There's nothing we can do with this child. And so what happens is then back to the psychiatrists and the psychologists, and what do they do? They prescribe Ritalin, which is done routinely in today's schools, you know, these so-called hyperactive children. And they give them Ritalin and of course Johnny then is turned into a little zombie destined to a life as a functional illiterate. This is a process that goes on every day in American schools. It goes on right here in the Chicago area. Millions of children in the Chicago schools are becoming functionally illiterate. As a matter of fact, Marva Collins became so disgusted and frustrated by that process that she left the public schools and created a school in her own home. And she took children who were considered uneducable by the public schools and she's turned them into literate human beings. I had the great pleasure of visiting Marva Collins' school the other day when I got off the plane at O'Hare. I asked my driver to take me to Marva Collins' school because I know Marva, I've known her for years, but I've never visited her school. And so I got there and there is this Westside Preparatory School on West Chicago Avenue, very unpretentious, You'd never know what goes on behind those walls by just looking at it on the outside. And there was Marvin. We greeted one another, and she took me, first of all, into the class where the little ones were, the little bright ones, four years old. I think one was even as young as three. And do you know the words of vocabulary these youngsters were learning? Four-year-olds, little black children, preposterous, bacchanalian, ostentatious, draconian, claustrophobia, debonair. Well, those were the words these children were already learning. Little black children of four years old can pronounce these words beautifully and learn them. Isn't that amazing? Now, of course, Marva has used an intensive phonics teaching method for years. She knows how to teach reading. But she also has that incredible ingredient of love that she ties in with all this because that's how she maintains discipline in a school of children who come from the projects. These are children who if it weren't for Marva Collins would be destined to become the intellectual cripples of tomorrow. She gives them hope. And I was absolutely flabbergasted. We went from class to class, children got up, recited long poems. I mean it was just, I could not believe it. Seeing is believing. I knew that she was doing superb work, I didn't know how superb. She's a very special lady, I suppose there are not very many in this world like that. I just wish that school could be duplicated, could be duplicated. But she's one person, and she wants to do it herself, and she likes to be in that school. She's a hands-on kind of person. But we know that it's possible. In other words, we know what can be done. We know what isn't being done. Incidentally, Marva trains teachers. And I took some of, when I saw that she had the training program, a little, some sheets of mimeograph paper with the program on it, I said, let me take some for this conference that I'm attending. There may be some people there who might want to attend your training program. I highly recommend it because she's so unusual. I think she's the kind of teacher who might go down in history very much like Maria Montessori, one of the great original teachers of all time. So she's right here in Chicago. quite a treat and to be trained by her would be something very special indeed. But what does Marva Collins specialize in? High literacy. She realizes that that is the key to everything. The way you speak, your vocabulary, your ability to deal with the spoken word, your ability to deal with the written word. Those children write every day. And they read every day. And they are reading great books. They're not reading look, look, see, see. Oh, oh, oh. They're reading Shakespeare. You know, they're reading the classics, Dickens. And they're developing an extraordinary vocabulary. They will be very special people. And that's what can be done. That's what we know can be done. Now, Christian schools know that they have to teach phonics. I imagine most Christian schools teach intensive phonics, but the problem is so many of your Christian teachers have come out of the public school system, have been trained by the teacher's colleges, that sometimes they don't quite know the difference between the type of phonics that is taught in a look-say class and the type of phonics that's taught in a pure phonics. First of all, genuine phonics is called intensive systematic phonics or phonics first. In other words, you teach the letters and the sounds before you teach full words. You do not teach a sight vocabulary. Now, the other day after a speech, a teacher came up to me and she says, oh, but we teach phonics. We teach it right up through the fourth and fifth grade. And I said, the fact that you're teaching it in the fourth and fifth grade means that you're not teaching it. Means what you're doing is you're marbleizing it. You've got looksay and you're putting a little phonics here and there until you get... Once you're... If you're teaching systematic intensive phonics, you're teaching it in the first grade only. That's the only place where it's relevant, really. To learn the mechanics of reading. From then on you are learning language. You see, from then on you're learning language. You're learning language forms, spelling forms. You don't have to... deal with phonics after that, teaching children the sounds of the letters, my heavens, they should have that before they're learning whole words. But if you want to find out how your child is being taught in school, simply ask the teacher, is my child being taught a sight vocabulary? Invariably, she'll say yes, and she'll tell you, oh, but we have to teach sight words because there are so many words in English that cannot be taught by, phonetically. And they will say a word like the cannot be taught phonetically. I don't see why not. You teach th's. And the e stands for uh, you know, so you tell a child that and you're teaching them how to read it phonetically. There are some words in English that you might say are, you know, highly irregular. Take, for example, the word i-e-y-e. That's an irregular word, but it's a one of a kind word. But even that is phonetic because that word stands for the spoken word I. And the reason why that we have a variant spelling is because we have three I's in English. We've got I as in I, I, sir, A, Y, E. We've got capital I for, you know, I. And then, of course, we have the Seeing eye, eye. So we've got three eyes and we use these variant spellings, I suppose, to make it easier for us to immediately recognize which particular eye you're dealing with. In speech we have no problem because usually it's context that will tell us what you're referring to. But in the written form we use these different spellings. Or the word who, W-H-O. You might say, well, properly, if you want to spell it phonetically, You should spell it H-O-O. Who? But instead we spell it W-H-O. Well, that is an exception. That's one of the irregulars. But as I say, it's a one-of-a-kind word, and it, too, also stands for the spoken word, so it is a phonetic symbol. Three letters that stand for one, for two sounds, an H sound and a U sound. We have them. They don't have to be taught as sight words. If they're taught in proper sequence and I don't teach any sight words at all. I don't find it necessary. When you have exceptions, you simply tell the child that this is irregular. I've never known a child to have any difficulty with irregular words. They're the ones they learn probably most easily. The ones that are a little different, a little freaky, you know, they learn them quite easily. So there's no reason to be concerned with that. Then, of course, that's the excuse that the look-sayers will say. Well, they'll say that English is not a phonetic language. First of all, they're not even speaking correctly. What they mean is that written English is not a phonetic language. Every language is phonetic. But every alphabetic writing system is by definition phonetic, because that's what it is. Letters stand for sounds. They're not there for decoration. Now, when they tell you that, they'll say, oh, well, because you know, how do you know what what sounds? We have this alphabet of 26 letters and 44 sounds. How do you deal with that? Well, that's interesting, isn't it? Why do we have a 44 sound language and a 26 letter alphabet? Well, it just so happened that when the Romans conquered the British Isles, Britain, They impose the Latin alphabet on the people there. And that's why we use the Latin alphabet of 26 letters. Well, what does that mean? It means that some letters do double duty, triple duty. Some letters stand for more than one sound. For example, the letter A. Well, it stands for the long A sound as in apron. It stands for the short A sound as in cat. It stands for the ah sound as in father, or car, and it stands for the ah sound as in all, or fall. How do you learn which sound is referred to? By the spelling form, that's how you learn. And if you teach the words in their proper spelling family, you have no problem. You teach the word all, ball, fall, call, etc. That's how you teach that particular sound. And of course we teach the short A's in that form and the long A's, etc. in the spelling form. The long A, you have the A consonant and silent E, which is a typical spelling form for all of the long sounds, whether it be A, E, I, or U. In other words, there are Ways of doing this. Simple ways. We've created the world's greatest literature with the English alphabetic system. That's why it takes care to teach it correctly at the beginning. That's why you must teach it systematically with care at the very beginning, making sure that the child learns all of the sounds. Now, some people say, well, don't you have to teach a lot of phonetic rules? I don't use phonetic rules. I don't believe Many people learn to read by rules. You learn to read by reading. I think you learn to read by recognizing the spelling forms and getting to recognize them. Some rules can help in spelling. The I before E rule will help in spelling. That sort of thing. Now, at Marvis School, the children recited 11 spelling rules by heart. Right in front of me. By heart. That was amazing. I don't even know them. But there they were, six-year-olds, seven-year-olds, reciting them by heart. Reminds me of a Christian school in Anchorage, Alaska, that I visited, the Harvester Christian School, and there, these little children of four and five years old recited every book of the Bible, that is, the titles of the books of the Bible, in order, beginning with Genesis and ending with Revelation. Real tongue-twisters, but these kids were able to recite it beautifully. I was really amazed at how they can do it. These children are capable of so much. Remember they have taught themselves to read their own language. That little Johnny that I referred to was very learning able when he entered the school and in two years he's turned into someone who's learning disabled. Now who made him learning disabled? The school. Now it's a crime. And it's going on every day in America. And it isn't as if we're looking for a cure to cancer. We know how to teach reading. We know what the problem is. The reason why Johnny is not learning to read is because he's being taught by a faulty method. But you wouldn't know it judging from what you read in the newspapers. The current wisdom is that the reason why Johnny can't read is because American women are giving birth to millions of defective children, children with learning defects. That's the wisdom among the educators. That's what they tell the parents. That's what they tell one another. Oh, there's nothing wrong with the methods we're using. It's the children. And that's why now they keep referring to dyslexia, which is the medical term for reading disability, that sort of thing. Well, I think I've, I hope I've impressed upon you the necessity and need for teaching children to read by the intensiphonics method. And if you have any questions, we'll save it for when we can save it for when we have the panel. But if you, I'll take as many questions as we can as time will permit. I think we're a little over time, but if you want to. They don't have it here, but you can order it. You can order it. Yes. Alphaphonics. It's called alphaphonics and it's The method that I use, I devised it for teaching children, functional illiterates, anyone to read. It just teaches them the entire alphabetic system. And you can take a child, for example, who's been, who say who's in the third grade and having all kinds of problems learning to read. You have to start over. Anyone who has been taught by sight and who has a reading problem, you must start from the beginning. You start teaching them the ABCs as if they never learned to read. That's the only way you can do it. Yes, ma'am. It's right over here. If you want the circular, it's right over there. You can get a copy of the circular. Yes, sir. Oh, that's... I hate to use the word bull. Period. Auditory syndrome. Well, but you repeated about the auditory syndrome, or children can't repeat what they hear. How preposterous. They can't repeat what they hear. Some children may have a little problem, you know, in identifying sounds, but if you're taught by looks, say, of course you're going to have problems. For example, I started tutoring a 40-year-old man in Boston, a successful restauranteur, a millionaire. He had never articulated the isolated irreducible sounds in English so naturally he had problems for the first time saying eh he couldn't say eh he didn't know what eh was or eh he couldn't hear the difference between eh and eh he didn't know there was a difference between eh and eh until I said well can't you tell the difference between bet and bit then he said oh yes there is a difference isn't there and you have to work at it if you've never been taught it But I find that little children usually can be taught it very easily. Yes, sir, up there. Oh yes, you start from the very beginning. A, B, C, start with... Well, there's not, you know, if the child can't read a science book, he's not going to learn much science. It's better to first teach him to read. then get him back to his science. I wouldn't say drop it entirely. If he can get something out of listening to a teacher talk about science or if he could, you know. No, no. What you do is this. When you are retraining a child to read or anyone to read, you first teach them the entire phonetic system Then, you sit and let the youngster, or whoever it is, read to you aloud. They have to then apply their new phonetic knowledge to reading, to improve their reading skills. Now what you do is, you stop them whenever they make a mistake, because sight readers do not know when they make errors. You see, they leave out words that are there, they put in words that are not there, they misread words that are there, and they guess words that they don't know. Well, naturally they have poor comprehension. Anyone would. So what happens is this. They will make all of these errors because it's not an immediate transition. They will make these errors. You've got to slow them down. Sight readers are fast readers. They make all kinds of errors. They edit as they go along. They're atrocious. You have to slow them down and tell them accuracy is more important than speed. You see, you've got to make them aware that accuracy is what they must aim for. And then, as you begin to correct all of their errors, then they begin to realize the errors they are making, and then they slow down. And then, of course, you'd have to take all of your multi-syllabic words and break them down into syllabic units so that then they can learn to read these words. And you write them down in notebooks and have them go over these words and take them apart and that sort of thing. Yes, sir? You will eliminate. Look, a true dyslexic is so rare that it was a phenomenon that we never knew even existed in this country until we had this reading problem. Nobody had ever heard of the word dyslexia before they began putting this look-safe stuff in the schools. I mean, true dyslexia is usually associated with some other disability, you know. Yes, sir. Three levels of reading. What do you mean by three levels? Well, you can only treat a child's reading problem individually. It must be done on an individual basis.