Navigating 1942 Is Not the Same as Testing the Sounds

 

A reply to Paul Thomas on the reading “crisis,” the cracks, and the ten-minute check left unanswered since 2020.

Here is my comment on Paul Thomas’s Substack post - https://paulthomas701128.substack.com/p/the-kids-today-cant-read-problem

 

You are right that “kids today can’t read” is an old complaint, and Gray in 1942 is a fair exhibit. You are also right that the United States did not collapse because some children left school weak readers. Dominance is a poor measure of whether a preventable failure was allowed to stand.

A country can remain powerful and still have thrown away the Edisons. The children who shut down were not a random residue of human nature. Many of them were the logical ones — sharp enough to notice that “buh-ah-tuh” is not bat, and stubborn enough to refuse a code that did not add up. We did not merely fail to teach them. We taught them something false, watched them disengage, and then counted the loss as poverty, disability, or the perennial cracks. What that cost in inventors, engineers, and independent minds is not in the editorials of 1942, and it is not answered by pointing at GDP.

Where the argument slips is the move from “no golden age” to “hundreds of reasons, so do not touch programs or teacher training.” That treats every failure as residual human nature plus poverty. It leaves untested a narrower claim that does not need a golden age, a new panel, or a nostalgia narrative.

In April 2020 you wrote that you have a doctorate, know you do not know everything, and are capable of navigating research. The request then was simple. Most children — on the order of 80 percent — learn to read whether letter sounds are taught cleanly or with the extraneous vowel still standard in many classrooms (“buh,” “duh,” “cuh”). They extract the code by analysis. A smaller group, often the more logical children, shut down when the sound they are told does not match the word they are asked to blend. “Buh-ah-tuh” is not bat. They notice, disengage, and get labelled. That is not a claim that poverty is irrelevant. It is a claim that one piece of early instruction manufactures part of the group you call the cracks.

Two checks would settle it without another century of editorials.

First, take children at the end of Grade 3 who still cannot read. Find one who was taught the letter sounds without the extraneous vowel. I have not found that child. The ones who shut down were taught “buh,” “duh,” “cuh,” and then blamed for failing to blend a word the instruction itself had made incoherent.

Second, teach that same group the letter sounds without the added vowel and record what happens. In remediation, a large share of these “non-readers” start decoding within weeks once the mismatch is removed — not after a new social policy, and not after years of balanced-literacy versus phonics argument. If that replication fails, the claim fails with it.

The same pattern shows up in adults. Fluent readers, including university students taught the distorted sounds, will often pronounce consonants with an added schwa and still read nonsense words on the spot. I have recorded that with multilingual readers who learned under the “uh” method. If the pronunciation as taught were the mechanism, that should fail. If analysis is doing the work for the majority, it should not.

LaBrant was right that “lack of drill” was used to dodge food, light, and books. She was not granting that every instructional detail is therefore beside the point. A child who already has books can still be taught a sound that makes blending incoherent, notice the mismatch, and stop. Poverty does not explain why the same child can read Malay or Pinyin and stall in English until the consonant sounds are cleaned up. Nor does it explain why a ten-minute check with your own students has gone unrun for six years: say the sounds of A–Z, then read a nonsense-word list, and record both.

If most of them mispronounce the consonants and still decode, the perennial gripe is partly adults arguing about the wrong variable, and the children in the 20 percent are not only the ones society has chosen to ignore. If they cannot, the claim fails in an afternoon. Navigating the literature on 1942 is not a substitute for that test — or for taking the Grade 3 non-readers, stripping out the extraneous sounds, and counting how many read within weeks.

Here is my post on Paul Thomas in 2020. LINK.