Rudolf Flesch

Yes, but they might have other things on their mind besides what you're trying to sell them.

For our purposes, the big breakthrough came in 1948 when Rudolph Flesch, then a language researcher at Columbia University in New York, published a paper called A New Readability Yardstick.

Flesch started measuring how easy it was to read words and individual sentences.

The same year, the Associated Press hired Flesch because newspapers were complaining to the AP that the wire service stories it was sending them were wooden and hard to read.

That's 2025.

Uh, in 1955, Rudolf Flesch wrote the book Why Johnny Can't Read.

I ac-actually have a copy right here in front of me because it happened in 1955, which we're doing a lot of research on right now for Christmas in America.

Professor Flesch, who was, uh, an esteemed PhD, uh, in library science, educator, writer, author, taught his own grandson how to read over the summer, teaching phonics, and in his studies on language, he noted that American education went off the rails and stopped teaching phonics all the way back to 1925.

Well, Kurt, I also have to blame just American culture in general.

I mean, you know, years ago, Rudolf Flesch wrote that book, Why Johnny Can't Read.

They've really, I mean, really, John Dewey declared war on the American mind about 100 years ago, and it's been going downhill ever since.

I mean, we've got to blame ourselves for the academic standards.

The reading or non-reading panic has been with us for the duration of my life in the United States, where I came from the Soviet Union as a teenager in 1980.

The following year, a book titled Why Johnny Still Can't Read by Rudolf Flesch, a blistering critique of American reading education, became an instant bestseller, though not as big as its predecessor, Why Johnny Can't Read, published in 1955.

In the early 1980s, I remember buying paperback books that featured public service ads with the stark warning that one in five Americans can't read.

I was shocked until I figured out that can't read did not refer to actual illiteracy, but to lack of sufficient reading and writing skills to function in everyday life.