Reviews of my book Shut Down Kids.

 

When I wrote Shut Down Kids: How to Prevent Kids from Shutting Down, I wanted one thing to be clear: many children who appear to “give up” on reading are not broken. They are confused. For years I have worked with so-called dyslexic students and watched bright children disengage after being taught letter sounds with extra vowel attachments—“buh,” “guh,” and the rest—until blending a simple word like big no longer makes sense.

The book asks educators and parents to look first at instruction, not at the child. If we understand why kids shut down, we can keep them in the game and give them access to content and rigor instead of labeling them as the problem.

Readers in the United States have been generous with their time and honest with their reactions. Below are some of the Amazon reviews that mean the most to me—two five-star responses from educators and a parent, and a thoughtful three-star review that engages the central argument about letter sounds and then asks for the fuller picture of what learning to read requires. I am grateful for all of them.

When Prior Knowledge Blocks New Learning

 

Pamela Snow once said I was “focusing too narrowly.”

Dr Karen Faulds suggested phonics may not foster a love of reading.

Both miss the point.

Claude Bernard put it cleanly: “It is what we think we know already that often prevents us from learning.”

The True Obstacle to Learning

 

David Boulton, the creator of the Children of the Code project, captured this phenomenon perfectly when he noted that ten times the number of kids who have innate biological learning difficulties have learning difficulties that are a consequence of what they learned. As Boulton put it:

"The biggest obstacle to healthy learning is learning – we can learn in ways that disable our learning. Unhealthy learning harms, injures or maladaptively constrains how well we can on-going-ly learn and stunts or disables our learning from extending into new dimensions."

Why PhDs Are Blind to the Real Cause of Reading Failure

 

It sounds incredibly alienating to feel like you have mapped out the exact mechanics of a crisis, only to have the academic elite look right past it.

When we talk about the literacy crisis—the roughly 20% of children who leave school functionally illiterate —we face a massive wall of academic denial. Most PhDs and education experts cannot accept the root cause of reading failure because they are fundamentally using the wrong baseline. They look at struggling children and see a biological deficit in the child’s brain. They are wrong. The deficit is in the instruction, and the most vulnerable children are simply the ones sensitive enough to be broken by it.

Remedial Reading in College — A National Betrayal

 

Rahm Emanuel’s remark that the number one class for college freshmen today is remedial reading should have sent shockwaves through the education establishment. Instead, it barely registers. Dale Chu shared it, The Principal’s Office confirmed what every high school English teacher already knows: “The kids won’t read. We’re really trying, but they aren’t.”

 

This is not a revelation. It is an indictment. And it is proof that the so‑called experts — the professors, PhDs, and authority pundits — have failed.

The Thorn We Refuse to Pull

 

Why extraneous sounds shut down curious kids

If a runner is limping, the first thing I would do is check whether a thorn is stuck under his foot. Pulling out that thorn comes before looking for deeper medical explanations. In the same way, when children disengage from learning to read, the first step is to examine the most immediate source of confusion: the way consonant sounds are taught. Even Sue Lloyd, author of Jolly Phonics, agrees that “saying the sounds as purely as possible is important.” That acknowledgment matters, because teaching letters with extraneous sounds—“buh” for /b/, “duh” for /d/—is not a trivial detail. It is the thorn that causes many otherwise curious children to shut down. To dismiss this as a “narrow focus,” as Pamela Snow has suggested, is unacceptable. Until we remove that thorn, no amount of broader theorizing will help children walk, let alone run, toward literacy.

Dyslexia Support Group for Parents

 

My computer has been under repair for a week and I got it only on 29.8.2026.

I read a comment by Paul Collin on my last post on LinkedIn which said:

 

Paul Collin 

Moderation decisions and evidence quality are separate questions, and merging them makes both harder to discuss. A group removing someone tells you about its norms rather than about whether the underlying claims hold. The stronger route is putting the outcome data in front of parents directly.

That’s Verifiably Not True”: A Deleted Comment on Struggling Readers Who Are Not Dyslexic

 

Here is a post on Facebook that I commented on and I received a message from Admin saying that my comment has been removed as it is not verifiable. Please scroll down to see my notes.

The Dyslexia Parent Circle — Your Dyslexia Expert

Here is the post and comments. 

Silenced, Blocked, and Refusing to Think

 

For more than a decade I have argued that phonological awareness deficit (PAD) is not the cause of children failing to read in English. Since 2010 I have written to Chapman, Tunmer, Elliott, Shanahan, Pamela Snow and others, presenting evidence from my own teaching and observations. What did I receive? Silence, blocking, or polite dismissal.

 

James Chapman did not block me, but he refused to think—even when I presented new evidence. His 2010 email to me epitomizes the problem: researchers who cling to their published theories as if they were gospel, unwilling to revisit them even when reality contradicts their claims.

Silenced Voices in Dyslexia Groups

Since 2010, I have repeatedly found myself suspended or blocked from posting in online dyslexia support groups. The pattern is familiar: I share evidence‑based comments, avoid personal attacks, and even refrain from linking to my blog — yet administrators still restrict my ability to contribute. Why?

Scroll down and you will find the actual discussions in this group before I was blocked.

The reasons are not hard to see:

Silenced by the Code

 

For over a decade, David Boulton’s Children of the Code project gathered insights from more than a hundred experts — reading scientists, neuroscientists, linguists, psychologists, anthropologists, historians, and educators. Thirteen years of interviews produced a vast archive of reflections on why children struggle to read.

Silenced Voices in the Science of Reading

 

I stopped posting on my blog in 2012, feeling I was going nowhere. To make matters worse, I lost my blog title and could not renew my weblog. My earlier site was at www.parentingdyslexia.com.

 

In 2015, another student was referred to me, and I wanted to continue with my blog. To my shock, I discovered that I had lost my blog name — someone else had taken it over. Thankfully, my son managed to retrieve the old posts, and we opened a new account under dyslexiafriend.com, where I reposted the earlier articles from parentingdyslexia.com.

Silenced for Asking Why Intelligent Kids Can’t Read

 

I did not attack, challenge, or criticise the work of Litigating Literacy. I did not even post links to my own writing. All I did was point out a fact: many intelligent children leave school as illiterates. I asked a simple, honest question—does anyone know why so many intelligent kids shut down from learning to read?

 

Illiteracy Persists Because Truth Is Censored

 

A post on Facebook said:

Litigating Literacy

We cannot expect teachers to provide effective reading instruction if their own preparation programs never taught them how. And we cannot expect children with dyslexia to simply overcome the consequences of that training gap.

If we want better reading outcomes, teacher preparation has to be part of the conversation.

#untilallkidscanread

How the Wrong Teaching of Pinyin Continues to Manufacture “Dyslexia” in China — and How Media Like the South China Morning Post Help Keep It Alive

 

In my previous post, “How Pinyin Is Being Taught Wrong: A Widespread Pattern,” I showed that the practice of teaching initials as “bo, po, mo, fo” (and the rest of the hudu-style syllables) is no longer an isolated classroom habit. It appears in popular videos, widely used materials, online charts, and even official school settings across mainland China. Children store distorted sound units instead of clean alphabetic components. They can often write characters from dictation, proving their auditory memory and motor skills are intact, yet they falter with flexible syllable combinations. Many simply shut down.

That pattern did not appear overnight. It is the direct continuation of a deeper, long-standing error that I have documented for years: the importation of Zhuyin/Bopomofo initial sounds into Hanyu Pinyin instruction.