Welcome to the Solution to English Illiteracy.
The Desperately Needed Idea Whose Time Has Come.








 

Chapter 1
Illiteracy and Why It Still Exists

You are invited to begin a journey of discovery in this book that can be both shocking and exciting. You may be shocked as you discover the extent to which illiteracy adversely affects almost everyone, as well as the monetary costs and human suffering involved. You may become excited as you realize that at long last there is a simple solution to illiteracy. It is a proven solution that will take only a few minutes of your time and will save rather than cost money, as it does now.

By far the most exciting news for parents and friends of people who are having trouble learning to read is the recently proven fact that all children and adults—except the most mentally disabled—can be taught to read. Some parents who are embarrassed by their child’s inability as well as teachers who have not yet learned the revolutionary teaching concepts presented here, may initially cling to the belief that their child or student has some type of brain disfunction. Samuel Blumenfeld and other researchers have been disputing the validity of these diagnoses for years. Why Our Children Can’t Read by Diane McGuinness, Ph.D., published in 1997, correlates the findings of dozens of reading studies—most of them in the last ten years. The studies prove that when the methods Dr. McGuinness and other researchers have perfected are used, all but the most mentally disabled can learn to read. This is true whether or not the diagnoses of dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, learning disabilities, brain anomalies, and similar labels applied to nonreaders and poor readers are correct. In fact, many of those diagnoses are not correct. Many students who have been given one of these labels have learned to read using methods described in Dr. McGuinness’s book.

The reason the words can be are emphasized earlier is that we live in an age of skepticism. Almost everyone has heard the statement, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t true.” Although what is presented in this book as the solution to illiteracy may sound too good to be true, it is in fact quite true. It has been proven in practically every nation on earth with an alphabetic language other than English. The reason the first paragraph says can be instead of will be, however, is that many of us believe that it’s probably not true if it sounds too good. As a result, we may be tempted to skip ahead, scanning here and there to find something that—without knowing the details—seems to be untrue. Without realizing we are doing so, we often look for a catch—an error or misrepresentation that makes an argument false. We want to quickly decide if we should spend more time on something that seems too good to be true. There is a danger in the procedure of scanning here and there in this book, however. Although we can easily understand the details of the illiteracy problem, we must consider many relevant facts before we can reach an accurate conclusion.

In other words:

ideas in this book aren’t just those of the author. The recommendations have been made by many scholars for well over two centuries.

This book contains more than 175 quotes from dozens of authorities, all carefully referenced (246 total reference notes). Most of the quotes included are short ones summarizing a much longer explanation in which the details are given. A bibliography—with a few references other than those used in this book—is included so that the more serious skeptics can examine the sources and verify that the author has not quoted out of context, misunderstood, or misrepresented the authorities quoted. An expanded bibliography, containing dozens of similar but unused references, can be made available to genuine researchers.

This book is divided into two logical parts, the problem and the solution. The first part explains the seriousness of the illiteracy problem. Among other things, it explains how many people in the U.S. are illiterate, why the size of the problem is generally unrecognized, why we desperately need U.S. and worldwide literacy, how much illiteracy costs each taxpayer and each consumer of U.S. products, how illiteracy causes severe hardship and suffering to the illiterates, and the causes of illiteracy. The second part explains why the proposal set forth in this book and shared by many scholars over the past two centuries is the only proven and permanent solution to illiteracy—both for schoolchildren and adults. The second part also describes the proposed solution and the way it easily can be adopted throughout the U.S. and other English-speaking areas.

The Shocking Problem of Illiteracy

For several reasons, functional literacy declined in the U.S. throughout most of the twentieth century and is now considered a serious problem by those who have examined the literacy rate most closely. The problem is beginning to get the attention of the U.S. public. Parents are becoming increasingly upset with their children’s education. A survey in PARADE magazine on May 16, 1993, showed that “63% of Americans rate the quality of public education as poor or fair.”1 In 1996, and even earlier in some areas, education came to be considered one of our most serious problems.

A September 3-15, 1996, Knight-Ridder Washington Bureau poll asked registered voters to rank sixteen current U.S. problems. The top seven problems the voters listed were: crime and drugs—81 percent; public education—77 percent; attention to children—72 percent; government spending, deficit—72 percent; poverty, homelessness—62 percent; welfare system—61 percent; and low moral, ethical standards—59 percent.2 This book will demonstrate that these problems are related.

A January 1998 news report stated that “urban schools appear to have hit bottom: More than half of the urban first- and eighth-graders fail to meet even minimum national standards in reading, math and science, according to the Education Week student assessment released earlier this month.”3 An October 28-31, 1998, poll by Pew Research Center showed that 88 percent of those questioned cited education as “very important,” the highest of any of the national issues. Based upon these and other facts reported here and in chapter 2, it is understandable that a 1996 article in The Salt Lake Tribune reported that parents seemed “desperate,” sometimes standing in line all night to get their children enrolled in what they believed would be a better elementary school.4

As you may know, illiteracy and crime are closely related. U.S. Department of Education figures for 1995 show that “75% of prison inmates and 85% of juveniles in correctional facilities are functionally illiterate.”5 This compares to illiteracy rates of 26 to 48 percent of all U.S. adults reported between 1985 and 1993. Discussing the illiteracy problem and its effect on crime, former first lady Barbara Bush stated, “All this tells us that some people can’t make a living in the legitimate world, and they turn to crime and sometimes even to drugs out of frustration. I’m not making excuses for them. I’m just telling you a fact of life.”6

Not only do those with a poor education have difficulty getting a job, which often leads to crime, but the frustration of being unable to read causes a significant portion of the discipline problems in school. Students who cannot read develop coping strategies. They become class clowns, they become “tough guys,” or they adopt some other role. Most of these coping strategies are disruptive in some way, making learning almost impossible for these students as well as more difficult for their classmates.

If students cannot read, they have difficulty learning any subjects that require reading for classwork, homework, or testing. In a sense, reading ability is the primary foundational stone of education, and lack of reading ability is a primary cause of all educational problems.

Most of the discipline problems in school, and much of the crime, both in the school and elsewhere, are blamed on drugs. It is indisputable, however, that those who have good self-images because of success in school are less likely to begin using drugs. Those who are failing in school have much less to lose than those who are succeeding. They are also more likely to seek a chemical way of feeling better about themselves and escaping, for a time, the pain of their failures.

Many in these polls thought education should be our top priority based upon educational experiences of their children or the children of relatives and friends. Many may have ranked education highest because of statistics they have seen in news reports. Chapter 2 shows statistics on illiteracy in the 1980s and afterward from several different sources. Front page articles in The Salt Lake Tribune on September 9 and 10, 1993, stated, “Nearly half of all adult Americans read and write so poorly that it is difficult for them to hold a decent job, according to the most comprehensive literacy study ever done by the U.S. government” and “47 percent of adults have such poor reading, writing and computing skills they cannot perform tasks any more difficult than filling out a bank deposit slip.”7 It is probably difficult for many readers to believe the problem is as severe as it is. We read, and we believe most of the people we know read, but chapter 2 presents seven reasons why the illiteracy problem is much worse than we realize.

Illiteracy adversely affects you—and all of us—in ways you probably do not realize. It definitely affects your family finances. Illiteracy costs each taxpayer an average of $2,550 each year in higher taxes and higher costs of U.S. consumer products. An April 23, 1996, report in The Salt Lake Tribune showed that U.S. crime costs $450 billion per year. Assuming that 30 percent of that amount can be directly linked to illiteracy (it may be twice that; see chapter 4), it costs each taxpayer another $1,150 a year. It costs businesses millions of dollars each year in additional employee training costs, labor costs, and workmen’s compensation.

Illiteracy probably affects a relative, friend, or acquaintance who is—perhaps unknown to you—a nonreader or a very poor reader. Although illiteracy affects everyone’s pocketbook, the effect of illiteracy upon those who cannot read well enough to hold an above-poverty-level job is far more severe. Chapter 5 briefly lists ways in which illiteracy causes real emotional and physical suffering among illiterates. Jonathan Kozol’s book Illiterate America explains this suffering more thoroughly. He describes people he knows and loves, rather than abstractly discussing nameless, faceless persons who are easier to ignore. No compassionate person can learn the size of the U.S. illiteracy problem without some degree of outrage that we make so little corrective effort.

The Exciting Solution to Illiteracy

Although the solution proposed for illiteracy in this book has been recommended by many scholars, it has not received widespread notice. The scholars’ recommendations are in academic works with limited distribution. There have been few, if any, books published in the last thirty-five years that even mention the solution proposed here. Other than informing you of the enormous need for solving our illiteracy problem, the heart of this book is the solution itself.

Your first question might be, “If the solution proposed here is so simple and so well established in every alphabetic language other than English, why is the solution so little known?” We often believe that if a problem is serious enough, scholars and governmental leaders will research thoroughly enough to consider all practical solutions to the problem, and books will be written discussing the findings. This is not always true, however. Books in Print, which lists all the books presently available in U.S. bookstores, lists more than a hundred thousand different books in print. Only two books are listed under the subject of the previously mentioned scholars’ proposals. Neither proposes the solution mentioned earlier. As a result, answering the question of why the solution to illiteracy is so little known before helping you understand how complicated problems are solved could call forth some of the skepticism mentioned earlier. Many examples throughout history have disproved the belief that if a problem is serious enough, scholars will consider all the possibilities. In fact, there is truth to the adage, “The only thing that we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history.”

Psychologists and others who study human nature find that when we attempt to solve problems, we usually do not consider all the possibilities. More often than not, as soon as we find what we consider a workable solution to an urgent problem, we implement it. In attempting to solve problems, we often try to do so within assumed but nonexistent limits. Many published reports on creative thinking and problem solving have documented this. Books of mental puzzles and games contain problems many readers cannot solve—not because of a lack of intelligence but because the solution lies in an approach never considered. The reader incorrectly assumes that such an approach is outside of the allowable limits. The bibliography lists a magazine article (see a brief excerpt in appendix 5) and a book by Eugene Raudsepp on creative thinking that demonstrates this by having the readers exercise their abilities on games and mental problems.

Trying to solve problems only within well-established—but often nonexistent—limits is especially true within a profession such as education or the sciences, where, as a result of teacher training, certain methods and beliefs are accepted by almost all members of the profession and others are not. Those who disagree with the currently accepted teaching methods or beliefs often do not remain in the profession. They fail to advance in their profession because they disagree with their superiors and are fired or choose to leave. The longer we try to solve problems within assumed but nonexistent limits, the more likely we are to think the limits cannot be exceeded.

We are not solving our illiteracy problems, and the resulting monetary and human-suffering costs are increasing. It is bad enough that we tolerate these costs for ourselves. It is much less excusable that we tolerate these increasing costs for those most affected—the illiterates who cannot act effectively on their behalf to solve the illiteracy problem. There have been many proposed solutions to our very serious illiteracy problems in the last few years, but our illiteracy problems cannot be completely solved within the assumed limits. Extensive quotes from several authorities in chapter 7 give conclusive evidence that, because of changed conditions within the last seventy-five years, we cannot completely and permanently solve our illiteracy crisis without spelling reform.

Spelling reform is seldom mentioned in books and reports concerning illiteracy and, presumably, is not even considered as a solution to illiteracy by most people. This is true even though scholars have been recommending it for more than two centuries. In other words, spelling reform is outside assumed but nonexistent limits on the solutions we can consider. Our spelling is considered unchangeable. As Edward Rondthaler and Edward Lias explain in their book Dictionary of Simplified American Spelling, “we refuse to challenge our spelling. We accept it as a ‘given.’ We struggle along blindly, desperately using what is no more than remedial measures; never attacking the underlying source of the trouble.”8 This book will show why spelling reform is the only complete, permanent, and proven solution to illiteracy.

Do We Really Want to Solve the Literacy Crisis?

Chances are, when you first saw the words spelling reform, you thought, (1) “I learned to read without ‘tampering with our mother tongue,’ and I’m no genius, so other people can, too!” (2) “I think there will be difficulties involved in implementing spelling reform;” or (3) “I dread the difficulty of learning to read again.” Let’s carefully, honestly examine these three concerns, remembering that this is just an introduction—the remainder of this book provides details constituting the proof.

1. Can everyone learn to read using the system that we did?

The belief that others can learn to read without spelling reform because we did misses the point for two important reasons. First, our reading ability is irrelevant to the abilities of millions who did not or cannot learn to read. Students of human nature know that as we grow older we have a strong tendency to forget unpleasant events from our past and remember only good events—that’s why the phrase “the good old days” is so common. If you learned to read several years ago, you have undoubtedly forgotten how difficult it was. Perhaps you were above average and had little difficulty in learning to read. That is certainly no proof that the average student today should be able to do what you did. In either case, the second reason is even more important: conditions have changed in the last thirty-five years.

In our increasingly complex technological and competitive world, learning to read is not only more necessary, but it is also more difficult. In our faster-paced nation (where televised problems are solved in thirty to sixty minutes) few students or teachers will accept the rote memorization and dull drill needed to learn to read used in the nineteenth century. As a result, teachers use inferior methods, which not only fail to teach nearly half of their students to read, but also requires two or more years to teach those who do learn to read, as opposed to about four months for most students of other alphabetic languages.

2. Will there be serious difficulties in implementing a new system?

When spelling reform was mentioned, you may have thought of one or more difficulties of implementing spelling reform. Every reasonable objection will be answered to your satisfaction. Chapters 6 through 12 will quite adequately demonstrate that not only can all objections be answered, but implementing spelling reform will save money rather than costing it, as all presently attempted solutions do. As you read this book, make notes to yourself of any questions or objections you have. Then systematically find and record the answers to each of your questions. If you fail to do this, you may reach the end of the book remembering your questions or objections but not remembering if you found answers to them. The problem of illiteracy is a serious one. It warrants diligent investigation and intellectual honesty with yourself in your discoveries.

Almost everyone occasionally complains about English spelling but then assumes nothing can be done. Paradoxically, some who complain most bitterly about our ridiculous spelling and schools that cannot teach our children to read or to spell correctly will object to spelling reform.

Some will object by saying that English is a beautiful language. You will note, however, that most of the people making such claims are those who have mastered English spelling. This has come as a result of hundreds of hours of study, which they have forgotten or proudly downplay the difficulty of. Can we honestly believe that ninety million functional illiterates in the U.S. and hundreds of millions of those who speak English as a second language would call English “a beautiful language?”

In a few short years, millions of English-speaking people will call N’wenglish (=N’w English = New English), the spelling system proposed in this book, a beautiful language—not because it has an interesting variety of ways of spelling the sounds in our language, but because of its invariability and simplicity. More importantly, it will be called a beautiful language because at long last it will enable easy communication among English-speaking people throughout the world. Enabling communication—rather than admiring the beauty of the words—is and should be the real purpose of a language. No one will prevent those who so greatly admire the “beauty” of English spelling from continuing to read it in the books they own and from using it in their writings. N’wenglish, however, will enable hundreds of millions of people who cannot now read or write English—among the 1.2 billion or more who speak English—to communicate by mail, e-mail, and all types of published material, which is less expensive, less intrusive, and more convenient than voice communication.

People often become defensive because “someone is trying to tamper with our mother tongue.” Since you or I did not invent our spelling, we need not defend it. People would far too often rather continue to endure the disadvantages of the known than to implement changes that would bring the advantages of the unknown. Almost anyone can think of reasons why spelling reform won’t work, but if they were to thoroughly investigate the validity of the objections in today’s conditions, they would find that every objection can be answered. Few have carefully compared the illogical and inconsistent spelling of English words with the spelling of words in other alphabetic languages. Even fewer have researched the ease of learning, reduced educational costs, and reduction of all the disadvantages of illiteracy that would come from reforming our spelling as other nations have done.

3. Will learning a new spelling system be too difficult for me?

In truth, there is only one significant objection to spelling reform: “I don’t want to expend the effort to learn it.” Fortunately, this is the easiest of all objections to meet. The spelling system proposed here is so simple, logical, and easy to learn that anyone who can presently read English can learn the new spelling system in five minutes. Briefly, the proposed spelling system is to spell every word exactly as it sounds, always using the same letter(s) to represent each sound. Most of what you need to know is contained in two simple memory aid sentences. The first includes all fourteen vowel sounds: “Kae Greenwood fried Joe Paul Bluepoint’s bug in our red-hot pan.” The second includes the six consonant phonemes represented by two letters and the WH consonant cluster. These seven two-letter blends are underlined here for highlighting only (it is not a rule of spelling). “Which yuett mezhurz this shelving?” In English spelling it is “youth measures.” TT represents the TH sound as in thin. This is the only phoneme not spelled in one of the ways it appears in English. This is because English spelling does not distinguish between the two TH sounds, as in thin and then. Together, the two memory aid sentences combined show the spelling of each of the phonemes represented by a single consonant.

N’wenglish is so simple that everyone who has tried could read material written in the new spelling system knowing nothing about the spelling system. This is because 81.6 percent of the spellings of the phonemes are the most used spelling of those phonemes in English spelling. This figure would be 92 percent if it were not for the pronunciation of the sounds of F and OE in the very common words of and does; the /z/ of the common words is, was, and plurals such as bags; and the /ee/ of words ending in Y. (The problem with English spelling, of course, is that there is not only a most used spelling but a next-most used, next-most used…and so on. See chapter 6.) Persons knowing no more about the spelling system than you do now will stumble over words occasionally, but after one or two hours spent reading chapters 8 and 9, a person can read the new spelling system with few, if any, stumbles. Skipping ahead to these chapters and reading a few short passages and then deciding “it won’t work” is equivalent to demanding to know the price of an item without first being convinced you need it and without knowing the details that explain how it can work. Part 2 of this book explains why this system is needed. Part one will convince you of the desperate need of solving our literacy problems if you carefully examine the evidence presented. For the benefit of more than a billion people around the world who speak English and of hundreds of millions of people who want to read and write English but are hindered by the spelling, you are challenged to carefully, honestly examine both part 1 and part 2.

There are many ways a book can be read, of course, but for the purposes of this section there are two primary ways:

1. you can read a book superficially, not paying much attention to detail, because the book espouses ideas you do not want to deal with, or,

2. you can read a book in an honest effort to determine if the facts support the book’s conclusions.

When presented with the details of an issue, it becomes increasingly difficult to criticize but stay involved in the issue. Critics often fear they would need to get involved; instead they prefer to criticize from a distance.

Almost everyone, when asked, will say, “Yes, we should simplify our spelling,” or “I wish we would simplify our spelling—it is so bad!” But when someone seriously suggests doing so, people often dismiss the idea with the same tedious rhetoric, “…but (sigh) it will probably never happen,” because they do not want to expend the effort to study the details proving how it can happen. Depending upon how resistant one is to change, it may take two complete evaluations of all the details presented in this book before realizing the truth of what is presented.

Although they may vehemently claim they want to reduce the monetary and human-suffering costs of illiteracy, two groups may be most resistant to the changes proposed in this book. The first group is educators. Like people in most other professions, educators often want to maintain the status quo in their profession. The second group is parents who are embarrassed by and seeking an easy explanation for their child’s apparent inability to learn to read. These parents often accept without question the explanation of the “experts” that their child is dyslexic or has attention deficit disorder or some type of minimal brain disfunction.

Those who are interested in solving our literacy crisis (as opposed to those who merely claim to be) will take action. They will honestly examine Dr. McGuinness’s, Sir James Pitman’s, and others’ claims—as chapters 6 and 7 show—that learning to read the present English spelling is so difficult that a different solution than the one governmental and educational authorities are now advocating is drastically needed. They will honestly examine the claims of this book—that only spelling reform will at long last permanently solve the foundational, root cause of literacy for children and adults. As a result, they will seriously consider the ideas presented in the remainder of this book—even if they have scanned (or read) portions of the remainder of the book enough to know the broad outlines of what the book proposes, and even if they have some initial reservations about what is proposed.

Fighting Symptoms versus Curing the Root Cause

Any proposed solution to illiteracy other than spelling reform attacks one or more of the symptoms of illiteracy rather than the root, foundational cause. It is equivalent to taking cough medicine for a cough rather than taking penicillin to cure the disease causing the cough. As long as a disease is left uncured, new—and often more dangerous—symptoms will continue to appear.

Changing the spelling of our words will obviously not solve all the problems that prevent students from learning. There is, however, one indisputable, overriding fact which is true for all but the most mentally disabled. Using a perfectly phonemic spelling system—spelling every word as it sounds—will make learning to read so easy that children will learn to read in the first half of first grade (or in kindergarten), and adults will learn in two to four months—as they do in other nations! They will learn to read long before the frustration of failing in the spotlight of their reading class causes the discipline problems and damaged self-esteem that stop the students from believing they can learn to read.

The educational history of practically every alphabetic language nation on earth—especially when compared to our own educational history—has proven that a perfectly phonemic spelling will greatly improve our literacy rate. This is because, unlike any other improvement we can make to our educational system—which would merely combat some symptoms of the problem—phonemic spelling will cure the root cause of the problem: the inconsistent, illogical, and confusing spelling system.

Although we may not learn as much as we should from history, we usually learn even less from educational history—especially that of language groups other than English. How many people would even think to compare our educational history with that of non-English-speaking nations? It is largely a matter of national pride. Some people may equate the situation with that of converting to the metric system. Only the U.S., Liberia, and Myanmar (formerly Burma) still use the English measuring system—they have not yet made the use of the metric system mandatory. It is not equivalent, however. Although some of the changes to metric would be inexpensive, others would not. For example, the cost of converting hundreds of huge metal-cutting machines—costing hundreds of thousands of dollars each—to metric would be financially devastating to many companies. On the other hand, converting to the spelling system proposed here would save rather than cost money.

Desperately Needed: A Simple Illiteracy Solution

As our nation becomes more technologically advanced and more communication oriented, fewer and fewer jobs are available that do not require reading skills. And, of course, world trade is becoming increasingly competitive. Instead of improving, however, our national functional literacy (the ability to read well enough to get by in an increasingly complex society) has been dropping. As one of many possible indicators, Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores dropped for more than thirty years at the end of the twentieth century. Furthermore, absolutely nothing done within the school system—other than spelling reform—will affect the tens of millions of adult illiterates who have left school. Adult illiterates are increasing in number by more than two million per year, and it is currently estimated that less than 1 percent of them ever become good readers after leaving school. As later chapters will show, it is more difficult to solve the problem of adult illiteracy than of students’ not learning to read before they leave school. Unfortunately, adult illiteracy receives only a small fraction of the attention the schools receive.

Today’s schoolchildren have many distractions and detriments to learning to read that students did not have before the 1920s. Among other things, today’s students have a multitude of time-consuming and pleasurable activities. These activities can easily distract them from devoting long hours to what for many is an unpleasant process: learning to read.

Charles Leadbeater, in his book The Weightless Society, says what many students, teachers, and parents know by experience, “too much schooling kills off the desire to learn.” He is referring to schooling that is boring and confusing rather than enlightening and exciting. He is referring, more than anything else, to learning to read and spell English, which is so difficult and time-consuming that our nation actually offers prizes to the very few who manage to get the spelling right—a program known as the National Spelling Bee, a program virtually unknown in other languages.

We often learn best by analogy. Two instructive analogies to our spelling system are sports and the traffic system on our roads. Would anyone really be interested in watching a basketball game in which a basket sometimes was worth two points and other times was worth 200 points and there were over 300 rules for how much the basket was worth and almost every rule had exceptions—and some of the exceptions had exceptions? Furthermore, imagine the chaos if traffic signs were illogical and inconsistent. If the stop sign only sometimes meant stop or if the yield sign did not always mean that you must yield, disaster could result. If you were doomed to a life of near-poverty because of your poor reading ability, would it be a disaster to you?

Unfortunately, our students have no choice but to follow the rules of “the game of spelling.” They have no choice but to learn to adapt to the chaos caused by our spelling. Although tone-deaf students are not forced to become musicians, every student must learn to read and to spell if they wish to live significantly above the poverty level—even those who have great difficulty memorizing the spellings of tens of thousands of words because they have an ingrained aversion to something as illogical and inconsistent as English spelling. Even the most brilliant engineers, medical doctors and scientists will have difficulty getting a good job if their resume includes a spelling error or two. One cannot help but wonder how many very talented workers have been lost to society because we believe only good spellers are competent to be our leaders in the workplace.

Rather than simplifying our spelling, we blame the student for not adapting to an illogical and inconsistent spelling system; we often believe poor spellers and poor readers are lazy or just not trying hard enough. In other words, rather than placing the blame where it belongs—on the spelling—we place the blame on the people who are victims of the spelling. We try to locate those who cannot read and spell and do whatever it takes to get them to read and “spell correctly”—and we have believed for centuries that there is only one correct way to spell most of our words. That one “correct” way for many words is totally unrelated to the pronunciation of the words.

Some educational researchers and teachers try to defend our indefensible spelling system and place the blame on the students by claiming that if only the students would learn all the spelling rules they could be good spellers. As the “How Bad Is the Cause of Our Problems” section of chapter 6 explains, even a computer programmed to use a set of over 200 rules to spell 17,000 common words was wrong 51 percent of the time.9

It will become apparent to the truly inquiring mind that the solution to our illiteracy problem must be to make the process of learning to read much easier and faster. In other words, spelling must be so simple, logical, and consistent that the student—whether schoolchild or adult—can learn in three or four months, as do students in most of the other alphabetic languages of the world. At present, the 52 percent or so of American students who do become good readers require an average of two to two and one-half years. After about two and one-half years, students who learn to read English can read second-grade or third-grade reading books, then throughout elementary school, students can achieve higher levels of reading ability as they learn more words—either through rote memory or through repetition.

Learning to Read English versus Other Languages

Those who have not studied the differences between English spelling and the spelling of other alphabetic languages may have difficulty understanding why learning to read English takes so much longer than learning other languages. Most of us had several years of spelling classes in elementary school. If we are familiar only with English, we may be surprised to learn that students of most other alphabetic languages do not have separate classes for spelling, as we do.

We may also be surprised to find that students who learn to read a phonemic language do not have the artificial “grade level” reading classification present in U.S. schools. In U.S. schools, a teacher may say, for example, “This student knows twelve hundred words by sight and reads at a third-grade level. Next year, he should know sixteen hundred words and read at a fourth-grade level.” Students of most other alphabetic languages learn the sounds of the letters in their language in the first few days of school. After three or four months, they can pronounce any word in their language. They can even correctly and unfailingly pronounce unusual words they have never seen before—something impossible with our present English spelling. When they pronounce or sound out in their minds a word in their vocabulary, they recognize (read) it.

Practically every English-speaking adult has experienced a situation in reading or in listening to someone speak that most other language groups do not: forgetting the pronunciation or spelling of a word we have not used for years. This is because other language groups only have to remember the spelling of the sounds instead of having to remember spellings and pronunciations of every word.

Those familiar only with English may be even more surprised to learn that English spelling is more confusing than Chinese picture writing. “The most unusual effort of this medium centered approach was probably ‘American children with reading problems can easily learn to read English represented by Chinese characters.’ (Rozin, 1971)”10

Chapter 8 shows that all English words can be spelled with only thirty-eight phonemes. A cursory study of the 736 or more ways of spelling these thirty-eight phonemes (see Tables 6-2 and 6-3) and an understanding of how we learn will reveal why this is true. As you know, different people have different abilities. Some people—especially young children and girls—are good at memorizing. Others like to learn by logic. Adults and many young boys prefer to learn new things by comparing them with previous knowledge. Some people—even some very intelligent people—are confused and completely turned off by things that are needlessly inconsistent and illogical. In fact, the above-average intelligence of some students is one factor causing them to search for logical connections between related facts and information. When learning English words using Chinese picture writing, students have no choice but to learn strictly by memorization. On the other hand, students learning English spelling may see, for example, two words spelled the same except the first letter. These words would rhyme in almost any other language. In English they may sound completely different. As you will see in chapter 6 there is not even one invariable rule of English spelling. Students have no choice but to learn by memorization or repetition.

Reference is made in this book to “boring reading textbooks.” These references are based upon quotes concerning the so-called “Dick and Jane” readers used in previous years but seldom used today. Today’s reading textbooks may be less boring, but they are still just as frustrating to new readers. If the method used in Dr. McGuinness’s book, Why Our Children Can’t Read, and in this book is not used, students will have difficulty learning to read. Before the age of eleven or twelve, children must be taught spelling by rote memory or repetition because they cannot yet understand two of the types of logic needed in relating sounds to letters as used in English words. The logic needed in learning to read English is explained near the end of chapter 6. After age twelve, students can learn to spell some words by grouping words spelled similarly, but remembering which specific words are in each group is little if any easier than simply doing the hard work of rote memorization. Regardless of the teaching method, however, roughly 80 percent of present English spellings are not phonemic and many months of memorization or learning by repetition are required. Some authorities will claim as little as 20 percent of English words are not phonemic, but this is only because they recognize more than one spelling of several of the sounds as phonemic.

Learning to read is difficult for some students, either because they are not good at memorizing or because they have a strong conscious or subconscious objection to expending so much effort on something so confusing. Even more important, less than 1 percent of the forty to ninety million adult functional illiterates in the U.S. today will ever get enough help to achieve the equivalent of an eighth-grade education. These schoolchildren and adult illiterates will never become good readers without intensive one-on-one tutoring or unless we, as a compassionate and patriotic American public, insist upon solving our literacy crisis using the only proven, logical, and economically feasible solution—the one proposed in this book.

Some reading authorities have concluded that our present spelling is so inconsistent, illogical, and confusing that some students—even some very intelligent students—will never become proficient in reading English until it is simplified. Research has not shown how many students fit into this category, but as stated in the preface, even if it is only 0.1 percent, that is still hundreds of thousands too many—especially if one of them is your friend or loved one!

Alphabetic languages vary widely in difficulty. As far as grammar and syntax are concerned, English is neither the easiest nor the most difficult—it is easier than many European languages, for example. But in one way—the spelling—English is by far the most difficult alphabetic language in the world. Frank C. Laubach wrote, “Ninety-five percent of the languages of the world are almost perfect phonetically.”11 Frank C. Laubach has found that students in many of these languages can learn to read using Laubach Literacy methods in one to twenty days! In some simpler languages, such as some dialects in the Philippines, adults can learn to read in as little as one hour!12

Students in no other nation on earth have the difficulty that our students have in learning to read. Although we like to take pride in our literacy level, the truth is that in our nation—where by law every child must attend school throughout childhood (and almost all do)—we have more adults who cannot read than in some nations with far less than universal schooling. News reports from 1982 and 1983 stated, “The United States ranks forty-ninth among 158 member nations of the U.N. in its literacy levels.”13

What does all this mean? Rather than risk overstating the obvious, perhaps the best approach is to ask two questions with obvious answers:

1. Which is easier, learning the letters that represent the thirty-eight phonemes in English or learning the specific letter sequence required to represent each of the twenty to seventy thousand words in our reading vocabulary by memorization or by repeated use?

2. Does it tell you anything about our spelling to find that students having trouble learning can more easily learn to read English using Chinese characters?

Chapter 6 will convincingly show how confusing, inconsistent, and illogical our spelling is to new readers.

There are obviously many reasons for our illiteracy problems, but no other reason affects everyone, as our spelling does. It is true that there are many reasons why schoolchildren devote their energy to tasks other than learning to read, but if our spelling were as logical and dependable as that of other alphabetic languages, students would have learned to read in first grade. They would also be much more likely to enjoy reading and to see themselves as successful in their schoolwork. They would therefore be more likely to see themselves as able to be successful in any worthwhile task they choose to undertake. The frustration of considering themselves failures causes many of their behavior problems and many of their failures. Many of their attitudes and failures carry over into adult life.

Why Has the Problem Not Already Been Solved?

Our illiteracy problem remains unsolved because most of us do not understand or believe the following:

1. The vast extent of illiteracy in the U.S. Warning reports have appeared periodically over the last twenty years, but the public has treated illiteracy as it does many other problems—by ignoring it until it reaches crisis proportions. Most of the public has paid little attention to the education problem until the last few years.

2. The vast cost of illiteracy, in economic loss and in human misery.

3. The great difficulty of learning English reading and spelling, especially as compared to other alphabetic languages.

4. The great effect that the difficulty of learning written English has upon illiteracy.

5. The near impossibility—due to human nature and economic realities—of solving illiteracy through the standard means (improved teaching methods, better textbooks, better teacher training, student motivation, etc.)

6. The vast increase in the need for literacy. Manual-labor jobs are rapidly being replaced by jobs requiring more reading skills, and world trade is rapidly becoming more competitive.

7. How easy and how helpful the changeover to a logical spelling system would be.

Why We Must Accept the Challenge to Act

Although this book is written to benefit those who did not or cannot learn to read, it is written to those who are readers—not only for the obvious reason that nonreaders cannot read it but also because those who cannot read do not have the knowledge, ability, or political power to implement the proposals in this book. The desperate hope is that you, the reader, will have the compassion to act in their behalf.

If we, who do not personally need a simplified spelling system to function, do not show compassion for the millions of present and potential illiterates among us and act for them, their pain and suffering will increase, as will all the problems and expense that we and our nation must endure as a result. A 1990 report showed that, “[i]f this situation goes unremedied for another decade, this nation is doomed to decline. We simply cannot survive as a first-class economic power in the information age with ‘minimal’ capacity to acquire and communicate facts, information, concepts or ideas.”14 Without understanding the details of the proposals made in this book, it would be easy to feel overwhelmed by the size of the task. It would be easy to say that it cannot be done, but almost anything can be done if enough people insist on it. Just a few minutes, used properly, can perform wonders. This book shows how. Spelling reform has occurred in several nations larger and smaller than the U.S. and in both advanced and unsophisticated nations. Amazingly, it almost occurred in English—in England in 1949 and again in 1952! So it is possible, as Edgar Guest so eloquently states:

It Couldn’t Be Done

Somebody said that it couldn’t be done,
But he with a chuckle replied
That “maybe it couldn’t,” but he would be one
Who wouldn’t say so till he’d tried.
So he buckled right in with the trace of a grin
On his face. If he worried he hid it.
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn’t be done, and he did it.

Somebody scoffed: “Oh, you’ll never do that;
At least no one ever has done it”;
But he took off his coat and he took off his hat,
And the first thing we knew he’d begun it.
With a lift of his chin and a bit of a grin,
Without any doubting or quiddit,
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn’t be done, and he did it.

There are thousands to tell you it cannot be done,
There are thousands to prophesy failure;
There are thousands to point out to you one by one,
The dangers that wait to assail you.
But just buckle in with a bit of a grin,
Just take off your coat and go to it;
Just start in to sing as you tackle the thing
That “cannot be done,” and you’ll do it.15

Notes

  1. Mark Clements, “What’s Wrong With Our Schools,” PARADE, May 16, 1993, p. 4.
  2. Knight-Ridder Washington Bureau poll of registered voters by Princeton Survey Research, September 3-15, 1996, “Our Concerns,” The Salt Lake Tribune, October 6, 1996, p. A14, col. 6.
  3. Gannett News Service, “New Hope For Urban Education,” The Salt Lake Tribune, January 14, 1998, p. A5.
  4. Richard Whitmire, for Gannett News Service, “Parents in ’90s Desperate About Quality Education,” The Salt Lake Tribune, April 7, 1996, p. A10, col. 1-2.
  5. Taylor Syphus, “He’s Learning to Read,” The Salt Lake Tribune, December 16, 1995, pp. E1, E10.
  6. Edward Klein, “Everything Would Be Better If More People Could Read,” PARADE, May 21, 1989, p. 5.
  7. Mary Jordan, writer for The Washington Post, “Nearly Half of Adults in America Lack Necessary Literacy Skills, Study Says,” The Salt Lake Tribune, September 9, 1993, p. A1, col. 2-3. This quote from Mary Jordan is apparently her assessment of the facts presented in the National Center for Education Statistics’ (NCES) report entitled “Adult Literacy in America,” which can be found at http://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93275.pdf. A subsequent report titled “Literacy in the Labor Force,” which can be found at http://nces.ed.gov/pubs99/1999470.pdf and which is part of the same study shows that Mary Jordan’s assessment is correct. In 1992 the U.S. population was 190.5 million. Sixty-two percent of the population were employed, 7 percent were unemployed, and 31 percent were out of the work force (page 12 of the report). The mean annual earnings of the Level 1 employed respondents for the three types of testing was $12,797. Comparable Level 2 and 3 annual salaries were, respectively, $16,073 and $20.963 (p. 122). The annual earnings of those who are unemployed or out of the work force would, on the average, be far less. The federal government’s definition of poverty in 1991 for a four-person family was an annual earnings of $12,500 (p. 178). There are obviously many reasons for any one individual being either full-time employed, part-time employed, unemployed, or out of the work force, just as there are many reasons for any one individual making a low annual salary, but these figures are including all of the different categories of people and therefore strongly indicative of the negative effect of poor literacy skills upon earning ability. According to the NCES report, forty-eight percent of American adults were found to have only a Level 1 or Level 2 competency. “New Math: Money Doesn’t Equal School Excellence,” The Salt Lake Tribune, September 10, 1993, p. A1, col. 5-6.
  8. Personal communication to the author from Edward Rondthaler, August 25, 1988. He stated that this was to be added to the next edition of: Edward Rondthaler and Edward J. Lias, Dictionary of Simplified American Spelling (New York: The American Language Academy, 1986).
  9. Sanford S. Silverman, Spelling For the 21st Century (Cleveland, Ohio, self-published), pp. 23, 9 and 11-13. A common spelling rule is “I before E, EXCEPT after C, OR when sounded like A as in neighbor and weigh.” There are times when the letters I and E following C or that have the “long” A sound do not follow these exceptions—they are exceptions to the exceptions.
  10. Kenneth H. Ives, Written Dialects N Spelling Reforms: History N Alternatives (Chicago, Ill.: Progresiv Publishr, 1979), p. 30.
  11. Frank C. Laubach, Forty Years With the Silent Billion, (Old Tappan, N.J.: F. H. Revell Co., division of Baker Book House Company, 1970), p. 478.
  12. Ibid., p. 36.
  13. Jonathan Kozol, Illiterate America (New York: New American Library, 1985), pp. 5, 226, as quoted from the Washington Post, November 25, 1982, and Foundation News, January/February 1983.
  14. David Broder, for Washington Post Service, “American Education System Still at Risk,” The Salt Lake Tribune, January 17, 1990, p. A8, col. 3-5.
  15. Edgar Guest, Collected Verse of Edgar A. Guest (Chicago, Ill.: Contemporary Books, Inc., 1934), p. 285.