Community Learning Center Blog

Why Johnny Can’t Read–a Book that Started a War

Written by Sharon Hillestad, Director of Tutoring

Dr. William Gray, editor of the Dick and Jane reading books for elementary children, successfully squashed the teaching of phonics and the first scientific reading program, Let’s Read, in the 1940s (see previous blog post). The debate on what was the best way to teach reading moved out of academia and into the public arena because of Dr. Rudolf Flesch, a scholar, professor, and grandfather.

Rudolph Flesch knew that several children, including his own grandson, were having trouble learning to read. By interviewing teachers, visiting colleges and researching curriculum, he discovered the cause of reading difficulties. Colleges were training novice teachers not to teach phonics; experienced classroom teachers were being pressured to abandon teaching phonics; phonic curriculum was no longer available to teachers.

In 1955 he wrote a book, Why Johnny Can’t Read. In it, he described how children were being taught to memorize words. Teachers were not skilled in teaching students to sound out words and that this was causing a decline of literacy. Why Johnny Can’t Read was a best-selling book. The author received letters from teachers all over the country confirming his assertion that teachers could no longer teach all children to read. 

An excerpt from the book The Reading War

Written by Sharon Hillestad, Director of Tutoring

There happened an event that had a devastating impact on our nation. It was not loud and bloody; it was quiet and covert. This is a true story:

In the 1920’s, a boy was about to fail first grade. He felt stupid and didn’t want to read, because he couldn’t. His father was Leonard Bloomfield, a famous linguist, an expert on languages. Dr. Bloomfield decided to help his son learn how to read by creating 72 lists of words based on their structure (phonics).

Dr. Bloomfield created word lists starting with CAT, HAT, RAT, etc and gradually his boy was able to read and spell words like PICTURE, LECTURE, CREATURE, ADVENTURE, and FURNITURE. After a while, he could read thousands of words and he loved reading books, because he could.

Dr. Bloomfield was overjoyed at the success of the reading lessons and gave the word lists to his old friend, Clarence Barnhart, who wrote and published dictionaries. Mr. Barnhart taught his son to read using the word lists. Then other New York families successfully taught their children from the lists of words based on the phonetic structure of words.

Mr. Barnhart and Dr. Bloomfield wanted to make the process of teaching reading easier for all teachers. They tried to get the colleges to show the word lists to students training to be teachers, but no college would do so.