Letters to the Editor
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
‘Tragicomedy in Albany’
This is an enthusiastic response to Edwin R. Thompson’s letter affirming the supremacy of phonics reading instruction and the pedagogical perfidy of the progressives’ “whole language.” He tells it strong and straight [“Tragicomedy in Albany,” September 28, 2004].
Even beyond his “wisdom of the ages” are data from the National Reading Panel report in 2000 and research at Yale Medical Center using magnetic resonance imaging for brain blood flow studies, per my letter “Reducing Adult Illiteracy, August 3].Their data combines to show that whole-language actually damages children, emplacing a disability my colleagues and I call “whole-word dyslexia,” or WWD, a term accurately describing the students’ predicament.
But you don’t need an MRI machine to see the whole-word dyslexia damage. A new five-minute, teacher-and parent friendly test, the Miller Word Identification Assessment, measures whether a student’s reading strategy is to use phonic decoding or whole-word memorization, or a mix of the two.
The Miller assessment is used by The Literacy Council, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, as part of a reading program for Suffolk County youth involved with the criminal-justice system, most of whom exhibit some degree of whole-word dyslexia. A copy of the Miller assessment – Level I will be sent upon receipt of a stamped, self-addressed envelope at Suite 5152, South Setauket, NY, 11720-4724.
CHARLES M. RICHARDSON
Chairman of The Literacy Council
South Setauket, N.Y.
‘Bill O’Reilly’s Odd Moment’
After essentially arguing that objectivity is impossible to attain since we all possess specific ideas that render us “biased,” economics professor David M. O’Neill, in his letter to the editor about Laura Ingraham’s September 17 column, claims that the only way to reduce press and broadcast industry bias is to indulge news organizations with “different” ideas [“Bill O’Reilly’s Odd Moment,” October 4, 2004].
While the liberal New York Times describes Muslim murderers of Israelis as “militants” and “suicide bombers,” Mr. O’Neill basically argues that we should counter this bias with another: the conservative New York Sun’s stand that they are terrorists and homicide bombers. To Mr. O’Neill, objective reality and facts are myths, so there is no proper standard or method by which to know what is right and wrong, freedom and dictatorship, murder or self-defense, since “reality only exists in our perception of it.” But where does such illogic ultimately lead?
Regarding the Holocaust, perhaps the most well-documented event in history, we should counter the claim of objective historians on this matter with the “different” ideas of the Holocaust deniers, who make the baseless claim that this genocide was a hoax. If there’s no one objective reality we can all know, then any claim, so long as it is “different,” deserves consideration and even equal status with any other.
Mr. O’Neill offers a quote by economist Alfred Marshall that warns against “the man who says ‘let facts speak for themselves’ without saying how he has selected them…” That’s true, but we must also beware of men who give worth to ideas simply because they are “different” from other ideas, regardless of how one came to that ideology: either by reason or faith.
In fact, an objective reality exists and we know its facts by using the method of logic. Beware of professors like Mr. O’Neill who tell you otherwise.
JOSEPH KELLARD
Oceanside, N.Y.
‘Dukakis II’
I am afraid of Senator Kerry. This is the unfortunate but inevitable conclusion I have reached in this presidential campaign [John Fund, “Dukakis II,” Opinion, September 21, 2004].
The Bush-Cheney television advertisement showing Mr. Kerry windsurfing may not be in the best of taste, but it accurately reflects Mr. Kerry’s most disturbing (and dangerous, to me) quality: He does in fact blow with the wind.
Mr. Kerry should recognize that no matter how much he may wish the Iraq war to be about Iraq alone, it’s not. This war, as President Bush long ago recognized, is one battle against the Islamification – whether violent or quasi-peaceful through immigration as in Western Europe – of the non-Islamic world. That is the goal; time is irrelevant.
If Mr. Kerry has a plan for Iraq, what is it? It sounds like retreat to me, and terrorists play the waiting game effectively. If the West doest not fall today, tomorrow will suffice. On the domestic front, Mr. Kerry will “never privatize Social Security” but how will he pay for it? The Democrats retreat again and again to failed economic theories as viable solutions to 21st-century problems. They haven’t worked; they won’t work now.
JOHN LIPKOWITZ
Manhattan
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