Sidewalk Book Review #4

In 1955, former Austrian academic, Nazi-escapee Rudolf Flesch published his classic critique of 20th-century American education, explaining specifically Why Johnny Can’t Read.

Turns out, after more than a millennium, the whole western world had been successfully teaching children to read using a phonics-based method — a method that teaches readers to sound out letters, to hear the parts of each word. Then, modern-day America, thanks to well-meaning and ambitious (if not naïve) progressive educators, got in line and marched in step with the education-publishing industry’s profitable shift away from phonics, toward a “new-and-improved” Chinese-style of reading by memorizing the shape and appearance of words.

The result had been successive generations of Americans for whom reading had become a humiliating chore, not a pleasure to enjoy — explaining perhaps the late-20th-century rise in dyslexia and other learning disabilities, along with their associated costs.

After documenting the 20th-century history of America’s academic bias against teaching phonics, Flesch ends his book with a quick primer, a primer with simple reading lessons that any adult can teach any child — or even teach another adult who may have been previously subjugated to the sight-word style of reading instruction.

Even today, Flesch’s report reminds us how big government’s handshake with big education creates both a buffet of funding and a long line of insatiable appetites, all willing to crush the kids on the way to the prime-rib carving station.

Sidewalk Rating: 5 Cracks. Excellent Read!

Sidewalk Book Review: “dare to lead”

When I saw the copy of Brené Brown’s dare to lead in the sidewalk library, I immediately grabbed it from behind the glass door.  

Brown, a university research professor and quasi-corporate coach, was famous for a 2010 Ted talk she’d given on “The Power of Vulnerability.”  I’d heard about her talk but never saw it myself. 

When I opened the book to find its publication date (2018), I saw I was holding a first edition.  Sold!  Into my backpack it went.

Once home and relaxed, I skimmed the introduction where Brown spells out her book’s “deceptively simple and somewhat selfish goal,” which is to share everything she’s learned in the past two decades about working with and within “hundreds of organizations,” explaining in 300 pages “what it takes to be a daring leader.”

Already, she was losing me.

In her forward note, Brown shares an anecdote about feeling nervous one day before giving a speech to a large audience of dark-suited corporate officers.  She shares, as well, about feeling nervous in front of similarly large audiences of military brass and non-profit administrators. She shares how she overcame her fears – or at least how she got used to them.

While Brown’s book is likely full of sparkling anecdotes, witty and pithy discoveries, and may indeed provide a path for someone seeking the courage and vulnerability to succeed in the swirling eddies of corporate corruption, folks like me, those who have already sacrificed part of their lives to and escaped from the high-dollar lure of organizational obesity, may prefer to follow my lead – if they dare – and close Brown’s book, take a deep breath, then go outside to check on the plants in the garden.

Sidewalk Rating:  0 Cracks.   Returned!