by Mark Swarbrick
The Dyslexia Myth
According to data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in the United States, as of 2019, around 32% of eighth-grade students perform below the basic level in reading proficiency. This is astounding. Nearly a third of kids in America entering high school cannot read proficiently.
When I read those stats, I had to ask myself: What in the world is going on? I am not the sharpest pencil in the drawer, nor did I get outstanding grades in elementary school. Yet, I was reading in the 1st grade and was reading quite well by the 4th grade. In my 6th grade year, I read hundreds of books for enjoyment, including Dicken’s 900-page novel David Copperfield, which I liked so much I read it nearly thirty times. I was not an exceptionally bright child. So why did I learn to read and why are so many kids today not learning to read? What has happened to our school system that so many children cannot read and do not want to read?
Certainly, part of the problem is parents letting their children spend hours and hours playing video games, browsing Tik Tok, and watching television. Being a proficient reader requires reading lots of books. Games and action movies take less effort than reading books, and will usually be considered more fun, causing reading to fall by the wayside. Not controlling this situation is akin to allowing your child to eat cake and candy for supper instead of meat and potatoes.
Why Just the United States?
But there has to be more to it than that, for there are other developed countries that don’t have the level of reading disability that the U.S. has. For example, South Korea and Nicaragua have literary rates that are almost hitting 100%. And they are not the only countries. Note the high literacy rate for high school children in the following countries”
- Finland – Over 99%
- South Korea – Over 99%
- Japan – Around 99%
- Canada – Over 99%
- Estonia – Around 99%
- Singapore – Over 98%
- Ireland – Over 99%
- Poland – Over 99%
- Norway – Over 99%
- Slovenia – Over 99%
Ask any public-school educator why so many in the U.S. can’t read and you will hear the word dyslexia. Websters defines it as: “A learning disability manifested by a lack of proficiency in reading and spelling.” Google it and you will see that dyslexia is big business. An endless number of books, special devices, tutors, and programs can be purchased or hired to deal with it. But dyslexia is more than just a disability, it is a political behemoth with countless organizations demanding more and more government money be allocated to schools to combat it. With all the attention it is getting, and the money being spent on it, one would think this was an age-old malady that is on the verge of being extinguished with government funds.
Nothing could be further from the truth. First of all, the malady was unknown a hundred years ago. It is also a non-existent problem in the countries listed above that have excellent literacy rates. So, what is the deal? Is there something in America’s water supply that causes only this country’s children to develop it? If it is the water, why haven’t adults educated in the 50s and 60s developed the malady as well?
Secondly, in spite of all the hullabaloo and money spent on dealing with dyslexia, the problem has not improved. Indeed, it has gotten worse. It is time to ask if there is something else going on, especially when you consider that there is no standard test or means of diagnosing dyslexia. If a child can’t read well, that alone is sufficient to render a diagnosis of dyslexia. There is no agreed upon objective definition of the “disease” beyond the fact that a child reads poorly. One could take any intelligent child that had never received a reading education and have him attempt a reading for a dyslexia proponent and the child will very likely be diagnosed as dyslexic. Why? Simply because they can’t read. That is the criteria for diagnoses. That doesn’t sound very scientific, does it?
The Dyslexia-Industrial Complex
Thirty-three states have passed dyslexia-related legislation in the past five years. Additionally, federal law already requires schools to identify and evaluate students with dyslexia and provide them with appropriate additional help. Of course, all this means an increase in government money for schools, something the teachers unions are forever clambering for. Anything that gets the government to take more money from tax payers and put it at the disposal of pubic educators is going to be something the powerful teachers’ unions are going to get behind, whether there is any science behind it or not.
I performed an experiment. There are online self-tests that are offered by the dyslexia-industrial complex. I took one and answered the questions as I would have answered them in the 4th grade. At the conclusion of the test, it said that I was severely dyslexic. There is something very suspicious about that, especially when you consider these facts: I was never diagnosed as dyslexic as a child. In fact, in our little midwestern school in Illinois in the 50’s and 60’s, I don’t think any of the teachers had even heard of the word. I received no special dyslexia assistance.
Yet, I now have over a dozen books published and have a nice monthly income from their royalties. So, how is that possible, since I am supposedly “severely dyslexic” and have never had special government funding allocated to straighten me out? This does not pass the sniff test.
Follow the money: The large number of students who are currently labelled dyslexic become recipients of governmental funding and allowances similar to those allocated to persons with special needs. Up to twelve percent of American kids have been labelled dyslexic. That number is climbing every year and it adds up to a lot of extra government money flowing into the schools. In spite of that, educators, schools, and teachers’ unions say it is not enough as they demand even more dollars for the dyslexia epidemic. Belief in “dyslexia” is as prevalent as faith in evolution and the belief that it is proper to give addictive drugs to children thought to have ADHD. One thing we have learned well: Leftists will never let a crisis go to waste.
A Manufactured Myth
Let us consider what Professor Julian Elliot says on the matter. Julian Elliott is a British educational psychologist known for his work in the field of education and special education. He has expertise in areas such as dyslexia, cognitive psychology, and educational psychology. Elliott has conducted research and written extensively on topics related to learning difficulties and interventions to support students with special educational needs.
Professor Elliot, along with other scholars from Durham and Yale, say that dyslexia is a myth, a made-up malady that accomplishes two things: It covers for the fact that children with poor literary skills are the product of poor education systems crippled by poor teaching methods. It also acts as a panacea for parents who have children who can’t read well.
Getting a diagnosis of dyslexia is often sought after by parents of children having poor literary skills. It gets the child extra help at school, along with an excuse that declares, “my child is normal, he just has dyslexia,” as though dyslexia was akin to poor eyesight that can be corrected with eyeglasses. The fact of the matter, according to Professor Elliot, is that the term dyslexia is just a fancy word used by parents and educators to describe children who have poor literary skills. He points out that there is no standardized test for dyslexia. It is entirely subjective, based upon whatever “expert” is being followed.
More and more experts are beginning to accept the idea that dyslexia is a myth. Their reasoning for this, they say, is an absence of uniform tests and clear guidelines for identifying dyslexics. Psychologists have failed to reach an agreement on what conditions actually constitute dyslexia. They argue that dyslexia could simply be a reference term on which all reading and writing problems are tagged and that the term is simply used as a cover up by education officials who run poor education systems, and parents who can’t stand to acknowledge the fact that their children are poor readers.
Professor Elliot has received a lot of backlash from parents and the dyslexia-industrial complex. Elliott says he has been misunderstood. He says:
“I can understand parents wanting to get this label, because there’s a human need for labels. But what parents believe is that the label will lead to an intervention, in much the same way that a diagnosis of a broken arm leads to effective treatment. And what I’d argue is that the intervention they receive when their child is labelled dyslexic isn’t effective – and furthermore, it’s very expensive and time-consuming, and it diverts resources away from what could be being done better to help all children with reading problems.”
The Real Cause
It is easily discernable that children who graduated from one-room school houses a hundred years ago were far more literate than today’s children. Read one of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s children’s books, such as Little House on the Prairie, and you will quickly notice that the vocabulary and reading ability of children in the 1800s exceeded what many adults are capable of today. In fact, pick up any five books written in the 1800s or earlier. Compare them to five modern books. You will quickly see a shocking difference. You too will believe what Rush Limbaugh warned us about long ago. There appears to be a concerted effort to bring about the “dumbing down of America.”
What has caused this? Why are children in America such poor readers? The reason is that children are not being taught to read in the same manner as children were a hundred years ago. The teaching method has been radically changed.
When I learned to read, sixty-four years ago, I was taught the alphabet in Kindergarten and in the first half of the year of first grade I was taught the sounds of all the letters, the vowel combinations and all the rules for determining whether the vowels were long or short. All these rules are called “phonics.” I will never forget the day, halfway through the school year, when my first-grade teacher said, “Class, today you will learn to read.” She put the word “LOOK” on the board and said, “You know the L sound. You know what a double O sounds like. And you know the sound of the letter K. Put it all together and if you have L-OO-K.”
A lightbulb lit up in my brain. I could read that word! I was thrilled. She went on to explain that we already knew the rules to sound out and decipher any word we came across. And it was so! I immediately could read. And as we read aloud every day, the teacher would say, “Just sound it out, one phrase at a time.”
This method of teaching has been used for hundreds of years. It is called “phonics first.” But shockingly, this age-old and very successful method is no longer being used. Today’s schools are teaching what is called “sight reading.” Teachers have been brain-washed into believing that “experts” have established there is a modern and more effective way of teaching children to read. Students are no longer taught the basic rules of phonics, but are instead shown a picture of a cow, along with the word “cow” and told to memorize the look of that word. They are taught to memorize lists of words. There are not taught the basic rules of phonics.
Rudolf Flesch was an American author, linguist, and readability expert known for his work in the field of literacy and reading education. He is best known for his book “Why Johnny Can’t Read” (1955), which critiqued the state of reading education in the United States and advocated for a return to phonics-based instruction. In his book he points out the foolhardiness of abandoning the successful method of systematic phonics instruction in favor of the new “modern” method of sight reading. He points out that trying to memorize the approximately one million words of the English language is ludicrous.
But make no mistake, there is big money in sight reading. It requires that a new reader be published for every single grade of school, which has the proper list of words to memorize for that grade. This results in the forced sale of millions of dollars’ worth of books. But if one learns phonics first, then once the child has mastered the rules in first grade, they have the ability to read any book. They don’t need new readers every year, for they don’t need lists of words to memorize. They can simply pick up Treasure Island, or whatever, from the school library and read a fascinating story and fall in love with reading.
Flesch points out that once a child has been taught sight reading, wherein the child is taught to guess at words he or she doesn’t know, the child’s literacy is severely handicapped. He says it is easier to teach a child to read that has had no reading instruction than it is to break the bad habits developed by those taught to sight read, or guess read. But there is hope. Flesch says that starting over with the basics of phonics can cure anyone who has been labelled dyslexic.
The Great Coverup
Dyslexia is a myth invented to cover up for the failure of the new method of reading. Dyslexia is a fairytale that makes money for schools and publishing houses, but is actually nothing more than the results of a school harming your child by teaching improper reading methods.
Ever since Flesch’s book came out, schools have thrown up a smoke screen. Any parent who asks that their child be taught phonics first, the educator will say, with an air of superiority, they teach phonics plus other modern proven methods. They are dissembling to cover up what they are really doing, teaching word memorization. The schools don’t think parents know anything. They consider themselves the experts so they believe the less they tell you the better. The only way a parent can really know what a school is doing it to sit in on classes, question their child, and scrutinize the homework.
Someone may ask, if the problem is the teaching method, why is it that some kids learn to read well, and others not so much. The reason is manifold. One, many parents give phonics-first reading instruction to their children in their preschool years. Another reason is that everyone learns differently. Some children are excellent at memorization. These may not be harmed by sight reading as much as some others will be. The fact is, all children are individuals who learn in different ways. Just because some children get by is no excuse for abandoning phonics instruction, a method which is highly effective for all kids.
The War on Phonics
The situation has become much worse in the last few years. Recent headlines warn that Illiteracy plagues U.S. schools as never before. Today, in 2024, over two-thirds of U.S. 4th graders cannot read read proficiently. According to the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 67% of US fourth graders are not proficient readers, which is the lowest average reading score in over twenty years.
The word has been getting out that it is the abandonment of phonics instruction that has led to this. So what do the educators have to say about this? They say it is the teaching of phonics that has led to this deplorable condition! Imagine that. Phonics was taught for two hundred years in America schools with great success, but now that some schools are reimplementing phonics, we are supposed to believe the dearth of literacy in America is caused by teaching what has worked in the past? This is ludicrous and shows how bankrupt the left is in the matter of common sense and logic.
A very real problem is that we have a generation of teachers that don’t know how to properly teach phonics because they never learned it themselves. That, plus the fact that there is an entire army of educators who have been brainwashed by the publishing houses, who are making a fortune producing sight reading books. And then there are the teacher’s unions, who focus on lobbying the government for more and more government funding for dyslexia. The big money of the sight reading coalition is not going to allow the truth to come out.
Curing Dyslexia
If your child has been labelled dyslexic, realize that only means he or she doesn’t read well, nothing more. And not being able to read well can be fixed with proper phonetics instruction. Do not expect that the school which made your child “dyslexic” is going to be able fix the problem.
You can fix it yourself. Get Flesch’s book, Why Jonnie Can’t Read and do the exercises in it with your child. Require daily reading and don’t allow any electronic devices until the day’s reading is done. Once your child has learned the basics of phonics, order some books that your child will find interesting, turn off the TV, and get him reading. Make it happen.
To begin with, you must have your child read to you out loud, every day. When he encounters words he doesn’t know, encourage your child to sound them out. Show him how to break big words into several syllables and sound them out a piece at a time. Show him step by the step how to use the rules of phonics. Don’t worry if you are rusty on phonics yourself. Flesch’s book will bring it all back to you.
You must order books that will interest your child. Get him some classic children literature. Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, Nancy Drew Mysteries or The Hardy Boys. Older books will expand your child’s vocabulary. Many modern books have been excessively dumbed down. You want your child to experience the joy of reading a “page-turner” that he or she is “not able to put down.” I suggest a bedtime reading session. You can read to your child also, so he or she can see how good reading sounds. Teach your child how to use voice inflection as guided by the punctuation. Encourage your child to read aloud with style so that he or she not only reads well, but becomes a good narrator.
You will quickly see that a child that has been indoctrinated with sight reading methods will try to guess at words he is not familiar with. He has been taught to guess at the meaning based on the context. You must emphasize that he is not to guess at any words. Be patient, as old habits die hard. Stop and give correction whenever a word is read that is not in the text. Emphasize that guessing is not reading. He must look at each word and sound them out. Let him know it is all right to read slow. It is not a race. Speed will come on its own with practice.
Another thing you will notice is that a sight reader will appear to “see” words that are not there. This is a side effect of sight reading. Since the child has been taught to guess at words, he quickly learns to anticipate what he thinks the sentence is going to say, rather than reading what it actually says.
You may notice on large words your child may see letters that are not there or letters in reversed order. A modern teacher would say, “See! Dyslexia!” It is nothing of the sort. Here is what happens. The schools today are teaching children to look at a word and guess what it is, or try to remember it from a memorized list. So, when the child looks at large words he or she is not familiar with, the child feels completely lost. Consider a child looking at words such as questionnaire, or questionable, or quest. Remember he does not know what sound the vowel combination ue makes because he has never been taught. And ion or able are also a mystery to the child. So, when a child sees the word questionable, he has no clue how to sound it out, nor does he even know to parse it left to right, for this has never been taught. The child has been taught to see the word as a whole, not as a combination of syllables that can be broken apart. So he or she has no idea how to parse the word. Therefore, the child sees the whole word at once, and to him or her, it may as well be in code. It is a just a stressful jumble of letters.
Can you see now that it is no wonder that a child will have trouble reading it? Indeed, children are not really being taught to read, only to memorize and this makes trying to read a stressful affair. And it is this confusion and stress that causes children to get frustrated, to reverse letters and get them jumbled up in their mind, for they have never been taught phonics and how to break big words down into little syllables they can sound out from left to right. They only see the big word as a long, confusing jumble of letters. So they go cross eyed just trying to see the word. It is no wonder they get the letters mixed up, because they don’t know how to read because they were never taught! Sight reading, memorization, guessing, and the lack of phonics instruction has given children dyslexia. Your child is not dyslexic. He is not stupid. He does not have a learning disability. He has simply been taught wrong. The fix is to teach him right.
The Importance of Reading
Reading is more important than math, science, or history. Why? Because reading is foundational to all the other subjects, for once you can read, you can learn anything you want. People who read have continuing education for the rest of their lives. People who don’t read – their education ends when they stop going to school.
Reading novels will take you to other worlds, or back in time or into the future. You can live any adventure your heart desires. It’s been said “a reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, but the man who never reads lives only one.” And as Walt Disney once said, “There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.” Napoléon Bonaparte said, “Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.”
Reading is essential also for spiritual development. Knowledge of God comes to us through the Bible. But if one cannot read well, that person is dependent upon others interpreting and explaining what it says. Checking the accuracy of what people tell you about God depends upon you being able to read the Bible for yourself. A person who can read well can draw near to God and unravel prophetic mysteries for themselves. The ability to read is foundational to learning the Christian faith. That is why Satan is so eager to destroy people’s ability to read.
The greatest gift you can give your child is to teach him to read. How your child progresses in life and how close your child gets to God depends upon him or her being able to read. Do not abrogate that responsibility to the schools. They will let you down. Give the gift to your child that will keep on giving to them for the rest of their lives. Teach them to read, to read well, and to read often.
