Dr. Seuss on Killing Phonics

This is an excerpt from the book Crimes of the Educators: How Liberal Utopians Have Turned Public Education into a Criminal Enterprise by Samuel L. Blumenfeld and Alex Newman. I ordered my copy through Amazon.com, but then I found this version published online:

http://blumenfeld.campconstitution.net/Books/Crimes%20of%20the%20Educators.pdf

The excerpt in the book references this more comlete interview in The New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/12/23/cat-people

Most parents are unaware that the Dr. Seuss books were created to supplement the whole-word reading programs in the schools. Most people assume that Dr. Seuss made up his stories using his own words. The truth is that a textbook publisher supplied Dr. Seuss with a sight vocabulary of 223 words which he was to use in writing the book, a sight vocabulary in harmony with the sight reading programs the schools were using. Thus, the children would enter first grade having already mastered a sight vocabulary of several hundred words, thereby making first-grade reading a breeze.

Because the Dr. Seuss books are so simple and delightful, many people assume that they were easy to write. But Dr. Seuss debunked that idea in an interview he gave Arizona magazine in June 1981. He said:

They think I did it in twenty minutes. That damned Cat in the Hat took nine months until I was satisfied. I did it for a textbook house and they sent me a word list. That was due to the Dewey revolt in the Twenties, in which they threw out phonic reading and went to word recognition, as if you’re reading a Chinese pictograph instead of blending sounds of different letters. I think killing phonics was one of the greatest causes of illiteracy in the country. Anyway, they had it all
worked out that a healthy child at the age of four can learn so many words in a week and that’s all. So there were two hundred and twenty-three words to use in this book. I read the list three times and I almost went out of my head. I said, I’ll read it once more and if I can find two words that rhyme that’ll be the title of my book. (That’s genius at work.) I found “cat” and “hat” and I said, “The title will be The Cat in the Hat.”

So Dr. Seuss was quite aware of what the educators were up to. He was correct in citing John Dewey, the progressive educator, as the culprit in this insidious changeover from phonics to the sight method, which Seuss believed was one of the greatest causes of illiteracy in America. But somehow that insight, made by America's most famous writer of children's books, has escaped our educators.