I saw the
following link on a Tweet by Faith Borkowsky.
Here are a few extracts any my comments.
Ever since The New Illiterates was published back in 1973, we have known that the chief, and perhaps only cause of dyslexia among school children has been and still is the look-say, whole-word, or sight method of teaching reading. In that book I revealed the fact that the sight method was invented back in the 1830s by the Rev. Thomas H. Gallaudet, the director of the American Asylum at Hartford for the Education of the Deaf and Dumb. He had been using a sight, or whole-word method in teaching the deaf to read, by juxtaposing a word, such as cat, with the picture of a cat. And because the deaf were able to identify many simple words in this way, Gallaudet thought that the method could be adapted for use by normal children.