If parents want their children to be good readers, they should keep them away from public schools.
The advice came during a recent "Eagle Forum Live" radio show with conservative legend Phyllis Schlafly, who is known for her effort to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment.
She was interviewing international journalist and educator Alex Newman, who contends public schools are harming children by teaching the "whole-word method" of reading, which had children memorize words rather than sound them out phonetically.
"The fact is if you want your child to be a reader, you have to do it [teach reading] yourself," Schlafly said Saturday on her show. "And you're better off to do it when the kid is 5 or 6 years old, maybe even 4, than to try to wait 'til after he’s had some of the wrong methods taught to him."
Explained Newman: "If you actually look at the neuroscience and the brain scans that they do on the children who learned how to read using the whole-word method versus the phonics method, you see that there's actual brain problems in the people who learned using the whole-word method, because you're trying to get the right brain to do a left-brain function."
In his book "Crimes of the Educators," coauthored with the late Samuel Blumenfeld, Newman cites the dangers of having children memorize whole words only.
He notes American high school students are not reading as well as their counterparts in many other countries. In the last Program for International Student Assessment, a test administered to 15-year-olds in 65 countries, U.S. students finished behind 19 other countries in reading. Among the top-performing countries were Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Finland, Ireland, Poland and Estonia.
To prevent children from falling behind internationally, Schlafly recommends parents teach their children to read before they start school. She does not think it's worthwhile for ordinary people to try and reform the education establishment.
"I don't know how you change the system, because they've got so much money behind the present faulty methods," Schlafly said. "However, I do urge people to teach their own children to read before they let them go to school. And that's what I did with my children."
The conservative activist explained that she read the 1955 classic "Why Johnny Can't Read," which detailed the importance of teaching kids phonics. She then bought some other instruction guides and taught her four sons and two daughters to read using a systematic phonics-based program.
Schlafly, author of "Who Killed the American Family?," said what she did was not a luxury but a necessity in today's educational environment.
"Now, if parents don't do that, your children are not going to be able to read, because whatever they're taught, it'll be the wrong method," she said. "They'll be using the wrong side of their brain and they won't be getting ahead."
Schlafly recommends parents go the full distance and homeschool their children, but she recognizes homeschooling is a big commitment for parent to make. Therefore, she advised one caller to at least start her child off on the right foot, with personalized reading instruction.
"Just make the commitment to teach your child the first grade and teach your child how to read," Schlafly counseled. "And if you do that, you've done the best thing in the world for your child."
Both Schlafly and Newman stressed the importance of avoiding the public education system. Newman said the private school he works for is a good model.
"I work for a school – it's a K-12 school based on Judeo-Christian values and classical education – and we don't take a penny in government money," Newman said. "We avoid Common Core like the plague. We don't accept government benefits and government standards and so on, and that's what we really need to do at this point. The education system has become so corrupted that to have a real education, you need to operate outside of it."
Several callers to the show asked about specific ways parents can teach their children phonics, and Newman pointed to "Alpha-Phonics," a manual written by "Crimes of the Educators" coauthor Blumenfeld. Newman said he used "Alpha-Phonics" to teach his 4-year-old son how to read, and now his son can read better than many high school graduates.
Many people have pointed out that Common Core does teach phonics, but Newman and Schlafly agreed it's being taught in an unnecessarily confusing way.
"I saw the way they're teaching phonics, and they have made it so complicated," Schlafly said. "It isn't so complicated. You simply just need to teach the young child the sounds, and then they can put together the sounds and make bigger words."
Newman claimed Blumenfeld used his own manual to cure many dyslexics of their reading disorders by teaching them to read using systematic, intensive phonics.
"[Blumenfeld] was taking dyslexics – people who supposedly had reading disabilities – and he showed that really what they had was an acquired reflex to try to read words as whole words, to try to kind of look at everything as a symbol, and it is possible to undo that reflex," Newman said.
"Some of the people who Dr. Blumenfeld worked with described it as painful, because your brain is kind of cemented into that way of thinking; but it is possible to reverse that damage and to study using systematic, intensive phonics and to become a good reader, even later in life."
Newman stressed that it’s best to learn to read properly early in life, as a child, before a public school has had the chance to teach the whole-word method. It will be much harder to do later in life.
"But it's worth doing," Schlafly interjected. "Even though it's harder, it's worth doing if you're the parent of a small child, and so I urge you to get onto that and do it as soon as possible."