Why Johnny Can’t Read, Book Review Example

Education in the United States is constantly a highly debated and discussed topic.  The youth of America is the future of this country and will be responsible for maintaining and advancing the current state of the culture.  In order for this to happen, students must be properly educated and learn the acceptable lessons, skills and thought processes by which the country operates and has been founded.  One of the greatest problems of the early childhood education in this country is that many students do not grasp the basic reading comprehension skills necessary to advance their learning.  Many of these issues are discussed in the book Why Johnny Can’t Read: And What You Can Do About It written by Rudolf Flesch.  Two major issues are the concentrated by Flesch to question the effectiveness of the educational system for preparing younger children for learning.

Flesch makes many accusations about the poor quality of the current state of the educational system that is directly responsible for failing thousands of children in the United States.  The basis of the argument shows two main flaws in the system.  The first flaw is that the information that is being taught to children in schools is focused on memorization, not true learning.  In fact, Flesch mentioned within his book that Johnny and many other students continuously are taught reading skills by memorizing a word with a picture or a sound.  Through this function, students are learning to recognize words and phrases based on internal memory.  For this reason, words can be misread or mispronounced constantly.  Many students do not receive the skills and learning necessary to read at a proper grade level.

There were many examples where this flaw in the learning environment drastically increased the errors by many younger-aged children.  Flesch documented that several of the students he analyzed and observed made errors distinguishing the word “said” from the word “judged” and so on.  These errors, Flesch argued, were primarily attributed to what he labeled the word method of teaching.  Teachers will provide students with flash cards or picture cards to enact the part of the learning memory that recognizes a shape on a page and can attribute a sound to it.  Flesch indirectly mentioned that there was inherently no difference between the shape and the word on the cards because they both focused on the same word method of learning.  In fact, one student was able to read the word “children” on the flash card but was not able to read the word when it had been printed with other words in a sentence.  The student replied that he was able to recognize the word on the card because he remembered the smudge on the card.  Therefore, many young students are not actually learning to read the words on the page; instead, they are focusing on recognizing anything on the card to remember the sound associated with it in order to provide the correct answer to the teacher.

The second major issue that Flesch brought up within his book was that many teachers treat young students are “small adults” and no longer concentrate on their limited knowledge or experiences.  One of the most crucial examples Flesch used in the book was that many students only recognize words or sounds because the teacher has told it to them first.  Instead of teaching the students to read and sound out the words, teachers are providing the flash card or the picture first and saying the sound themselves.  Letter-sounds are no longer useful in today’s learning environment because it takes longer for students to learn the information necessary to read new words.  This information is usually not built into curriculums because of many of the standardized tests that are being administered.  Teachers are now held accountable for their students learning what is necessary for them to pass the tests, nothing more and nothing less.  Because of these requirements and the expediency required for the learning process, many children are taught the very basics and are being short-changed on the quality of their education.

These two main issues are very intriguing.  Clearly, the second issue is definitely a great problem that causes many students to be shoved along from grade to grade.  The educational system relies on the data comprised from these standardized tests and many educational institutions rely on quality test performance in order to receive state and federal funding.  These issues are very serious because they no longer concentrate on the benefits of the students, but they are instead focusing on the benefits of the school and following a strict curriculum that is time-focused.

Although Flesch raises many important issues throughout the book, the concept that the shape or word recall technique hinders learning is very misconstrued.  Many language learning software programs and tutors utilize these techniques to promote learning.  In fact, Rosetta Stone has become one of the leading language learning providers around the United States and the rest of the world because it focuses solely on shape, image and sound recognition.  However, the difference is that Rosetta Stone also shows a truncated portion of a world so that the individual can learn what a grouping of letters looks like to sound it out in other words later on.  This does show that word method can be beneficial for students.  The problem is that many students in the classroom environment are only seeing one source of the word and are not seeing the word included in a full sentence while learning it.  This is not always a curriculum or speed issue, but simply a lack on the part of the teaching instructor.  Students must see the words in all types of formats.

Johnny is in dire need of a teacher to spend extra time with him instead of pushing him through the educational system without focusing on whether he is learning the materials and actually grasping new words.  Reading is not based on whether a flash card or test is answered correctly, but the concentration should be focused on reading comprehension.  Word recognition and comprehension are two different components of reading.  Johnny needs to be introduced to entire sentences and being able to pick apart the sentences to add in his word recognition skills.  The skills he has through reading flash cards and taking tests are not useless.  It is my job as an educational professional to take Johnny’s current skills and add in the aspect of reading comprehension.  I believe that Johnny is not as far off as the book may imply, but he does require additional learning and attention to catch up to where he needs to be.