To the editor:

After the Journal article late last year (11-29-08) on "reading deficits" at Jefferson Elementary, I noticed four issues (1-21-09, 1-25-09, 2-7-09, 3-10-09) with pictures of Jefferson students involved in such things as different types of dancing and touring a semi. Perhaps there is justification for such things - as long as intensive phonics was getting ample attention also. But was it? And will it be used by the Minnesota Reading Corps that is now coming to the rescue (Journal, 7-16-09)?

I'll let others elaborate:

In The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, Richard Feynmann, member of the commission that investigated the 1986 Challenger disaster, wrote: "There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you'll see the reading scores keep going down - or hardly going up - in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods," p. 207.

In The Sweetheart of the Silent Majority, Carol Rosenthal wrote: " 'It was one of the most rewarding and successful and exciting things I've ever done,' [Phyllis] Schlafly said about teaching each and every one of her children how to read," p. 122.

In an Internet article on Sam Blumenfeld, "Reformer of the month," we read: " 'Last July there was an article in the Boston Globe about Boston's reading problem,' says Blumenfeld. 'Mayor Menino had launched a literacy program five years ago in an attempt to wipe out illiteracy among Boston's school children. Now five years later, they're still talking about this reading problem. The educators now tell us that they have a new "balanced" reading program which combines whole language with phonics. That's the worst of all possible worlds because you totally confuse a child as to what kind of reading system we have.'"

John Taylor Gatto's An Underground History of American Education (2001) may be a little intimidating, but two of his other books. Dumbing Us Down - The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992) and Weapons of Mass Instruction (2008), are much shorter and also pack a good punch.

From the 1992 book we bring these quotations: "What, after all this time, is the purposeof mass-schooling supposed to be? Reading, writing, and arithmetic can't be the answer, because properly approached those things take less than a hundred hours to transmit - and we have abundant evidence that each is readily self-taught in the right setting and time," p. 67. "One of the surest ways to recognize education is that it doesn't cost very much," p. 77. "Don't be panicked by scare tactics into surrendering your children to experts," p. 103. "Thousands of humane, caring people work in schools, as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions," p. 25.

From the 2008 book: "To learn to read and to like it takes about thirty contact hours under the right circumstances, sometimes a few more, sometimes a few less," p. 152. "I concluded long ago that some deliberate intent was (and is) at work on the school institution, that it operates far from public access, and until it is confronted the term 'school reform' is meaningless," p. 179.

While looking up Blumenfeld and Gatto on the Internet, check out Charlotte Iserbyt as well.

R.E. Wehrwein

New Ulm