insisted he had to re-learn reading through The One True Way
Honest to pete, how do they think people in literate cultures learned to read for thousands of years before they and their Extremely Neccessary Methods came along?
They'd probably tell you that they didn't
really know how to read, at least not in the way that Language Arts Experts (tm) understand it today.
Oh, sure, people like Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Bronte sisters wrote some books, but they probably would have bombed out on our worksheets when they were kids. And besides, writing a novel is totally different from verbal comprehension skills, and
just because you can write Jane Eyre doesn't mean you understand the critical thinking skills necessary to decode a text and choose the best answer to questions about relationships between concepts and actions in the passage (phew).
