Why Johnny Can't Read

Why Johnny Can't Read: And What You Can Do about It was a 1955 book by Rudolf Flesch famous for forcefully supporting the use of phonics to teach reading, harshly attacking the purveyors of the then-ascendant Word method (or Whole Word method), and launching what have come to be called the Reading Wars. The book consists of two main parts: a polemic of about 110 pages, followed by an "Exercises" section of some 87 pages, which provides a (rather undetailed) method to teach children phonics.

Flesch had a Ph.D. from Teachers College at Columbia University. He was born and raised in Austria. He begins his book with "A Letter to Johnny's Mother" in which he explains that the reason little Johnny was not able to read was that he had been mistaught. Flesch writes that other countries, such as his native Austria, had no remedial reading programs because they all used phonics to teach reading, and phonics is successful whenever it is tried.

The book was extremely controversial in the decades since it was published. It came to have a decidedly poor reputation among education professors and some other professional educators, who among other things associated it with conservativism.