NEW YORK -- Dr. Rudolf Flesch, a champion of literacy and critic of 'look-and-say' reading methods who wrote 'Why Johnny Can't Read,' died Sunday of heart failure at Dobbs Ferry Hospital, The New York Times reported Tuesday. He was 75.
Flesch, who lived in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., had for many years suffered heart disease, the Times said.
Although much of his energy was directed toward clear writing, he was best known for his landmark writings on reading and his 30-year campaign against the problems of illiteracy in the United States.
'Why Johnny Can't Read' was first published in 1955, and until he died, he never changed his message.
'Our schools do a poor job of teaching reading,' Flesch wrote in the Times last year.
Flesch believed that by teaching children the meaning of whole words rather than teaching them the sounds of letters, the method used by most American schools, was 'extremely inefficient,' the paper said.
He was a firm proponent of phonics methods, which teach children the sounds of letters which they can use to sound out words.
'All alphabetic languages except English are taught this way,' he wrote in the Times. 'Why do we do it differently?'
He said it was in the 1930s that 'our schools switched from reading to teaching word-guessing, using the so-called look-and-say method rather than systematic phonics.'
'Our 60 million illiterates are the victims of our own educational establishment,' he wrote.
Rudolph Franz Flesch was born May 8, 1911, in Vienna, the son of Hugo Flesch and Helene Basch.
He earned a doctorate of law at the University of Vienna and a Ph.D. in library science from Columbia University in 1943, the Times said.
His first book, 'The Art of Plain Talk,' espoused basic writing in an easy-to-read style and was published in 1946.
Over the next 37 years, Flesch wrote more than a dozen books, including, in 1981, 'Why Johnny Still Can't Read.'
His wife, Elizabeth, whom he married in 1941, died in 1975.
He is survived by a sister, six children and four grandchildren. His funeral will be private.
