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.

By 2017, even Timothy Shanahan softened his stance, acknowledging that the PAD explanation was not sufficient. That shift was not because of new brilliance from researchers, but because students and practitioners had already seen the cracks years earlier. Yet Chapman and Tunmer still repeat the mantra: “phonological awareness deficit is the cause of dyslexia.”

 

Meanwhile, the International Dyslexia Association itself admits that many children diagnosed as dyslexic may be “instructional casualties.” May be? I have observed and interviewed students since 2004. I have seen the defective classroom instructions firsthand. Why is this not being studied seriously? Why is lived evidence brushed off as “anecdotal”?

 

Instead of thinking, these researchers take the easy way out: blame “whole language.” But blaming whole language is a convenient scapegoat. It avoids the harder question: why are children still leaving school as functional illiterates across different instructional eras? Why have they not taken the step back that Gough and Tunmer themselves suggested in 1986—asking why children cannot decode?

 

The truth is simple but uncomfortable: many children are casualties of wrong teaching. They are confused by distorted letter-sound instruction, by extraneous sounds added to consonants, by neglect of high-frequency words. They are not neurologically impaired; they are mis-taught.

 

Stop the nonsense of demanding “empirical evidence” for why consonants should not be taught with added sounds. Stop hiding behind research reports that recycle the same claims without thinking. Use the God-given brain to think.

 

As Charlie Munger said: “The human mind is like the human egg; once it accepts one idea, it closes to anything else.” Chapman and Tunmer exemplify this. They accepted PAD as the cause of dyslexia decades ago, and their minds closed.

 

But the evidence from classrooms, from children themselves, remains open. And it tells a different story.

 

“Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.” — Henry Ford