Useless Effort

And so the experts "proved" that attempts to improve reading by training eye movements were useless. Documented research had shown that eye movements had no independence but were only symptoms of the central brain processes of perception and comprehension. Because they are reflective rather than primary it must be useless to change the eye patterns. The logical conclusion is that the only way to improve reading is to improve the reader's ability to perceive and interpret the material. For this reason, few college reading centers in the 1950's offered any courses labeled "speed reading." Whatever teaching was done in this area was structured to improve reading-study skills like vocabulary, selectivity, and versatility.

Reading authorities concluded that the ability to read at extreme speeds was a rare gift that nobody could "teach." Most of these experts still assert this belief today. The Harvard reading people, however, take a broader middle position. They hold that in the setting of college work one must provide as much for the improvement of conventional reading skills as for the breakthrough into extreme speeds for those people capable of it. Says Roderic C. Hodgins, who has taught Harvard's reading course more than anybody else in the past five years, "It is like teaching somebody to ride a bicycle. It is perfectly easy to tell him what is done, but you cannot train a sense of balance.... The pupil says 'teach me to read faster,' but I can't grab hold of his eyeballs and wiggle them for him. You are trying to tell the average guy about something which is highly idiosyncratic. It is here that I begin to think to teach is an intransitive verb."

Then one afternoon in the spring of 1959 Evenly Wood set up a Reading Dynamics course in Wilmington, Delaware. Here was staged the first and most important battle of Wood versus Establishment. Although similar in issues to the conflict between the reading machine and the experts, it was to end in a resounding triumph for Mrs. Wood and her concept.

Once upon a time years before, so the legend goes, when Mrs. Wood had been a high school teacher in Utah, she handed her Master's thesis to a professor and watched astounded as he flipped the pages at 6000 words per minute. Intriqued, she soon rounded up 50 equally rapid readers and after a few years discovered their secret and had it patented. It took two more years to teach herself the method and after that Mrs. Wood began experimenting with Utah high school students. After running through a good percentage of Utah's high school population, she decided to commercialize and there she was in Wilmington, Delaware in the spring of 1959.

Delaware Reading

Also located in Wilmington was the University of Delaware and its Reading-Study Center. The center was directed by Russel G. Stauffer, who is now president of the International Reading Association. "I was getting many telephone queries about the new Wood technique and the feasibility of rates ranging from 5,000 to 20,000 words per minute. I indicated that my 'informed' judgement led me to conclude that such rates were hardly attainable. I was just as heated in my denials as anybody could be, but I was forced to deal with her."

Stauffer enrolled in Mrs. Wood's course and ended up reading fiction at more than 2000 words a minute. Next, he organized a class of about 20 hardheaded faculty members, including the University president, the Librarian, the Dean of Students, and the Dean of the School of Engineering. According to Stauffer, two persons dropped the course for personal reasons and those who remained reported markedly increased rates and satisfaction with the course in general.

During the Fall semester, Evelyn Wood was appointed an assistant professor in the School of Education, and remained there for one year, structuring a three credit course in speed reading which is still being given at Delaware. When she left, there even was one graduate student working for his doctorate in Reading Dynamics.

Evenly Wood took the University of Delaware by storm