The devastation that the “whole word” movement has wreaked on generations of schoolchildren who never learned how to read properly is having other deleterious effects. Joanne Jacobs has an article that describes how lack of phonics knowledge makes it difficult to learn foreign languages as well.

The people who have foisted this nonsense on our children shouldn’t just be fired–they should be punished. What they’ve done to blight the future of millions of children is criminal, with the only plausible excuse being their mental incapacity. It makes you want to bring back the stocks, at least.

How did we allow the mindless educational establishment to get so much control over what’s arguably one of the most important tasks of society–teaching our children, and impose such non-scientific and idiotic policies on the entire system, based only on academic theories, from academic departments that are the repository for rejects from serious fields? As the report of two decades ago put it, something like, “If a foreign nation imposed on us the educational system that we’ve imposed upon ourselves, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.”

It reminds me of the old joke about the Soviet Union.

A boy asks his teacher in class, “Teacher, was Marx truly the greatest social scientist in history?”

And the teacher replies, yes, of course he was.

“Well, then, if he was such a great scientist, why didn’t he try this crap on rats first?”