george stancliffe

I first stumbled onto this book by accident in the spring of 1980. Ever since I read Dr. McBride's book, my greatest professional ambition has been to teach speed reading to children. Vearl McBride goes beyond just speed reading. He demonstrates the immense possibilities of speed reading in opening up the minds of our children in many ways and in many subject areas. And after 30 years, the world still doesn't have a clue how important his discoveries are. I'll admit, the only motive that I had to speed read, at first, was to go through my college textbooks faster and cut my study time in half. What got my attention was the VISION that McBride showed for the subject of Speed Reading. For example, McBride experimented with the idea of TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES USING SPEED READING TECHNIQUES. Here how it works: Many pages of reading material (stories) are translated from English into Spanish. Each line of English text is followed by the identical line of text in Spanish. So each page of the story has alternating lines of English and Spanish. This allows the children to see all the words and their respective translations at a glance. For the next 6 weeks, the children are taught to speed read, using hundreds of pages of the bi-lingual text as the reading material. At the end of 6 weeks, the children are able to speed read Spanish-only text at up to 2,000 wpm, with comprehension. Really. I know it sounds improbable, but take a look at Dr. McBride's other achievements: 1) He discovered and pioneered the idea that young children can and should be taught to speed read. He was virtually ignored for over 30 years. His work is still ignored by most of the experts and many within the speed reading industry itself. Dr McBride's book was so good, that when I finally wrote a book of my own (SPEED READING 4 KIDS) I dedicated it to Vearl G. McBride. After having taught speed reading to thousands of people, myself, from ages 7 through 77, I can say with confidence that young children from ages 8-12 learn speed reading the easiest of any age group. I know many parents and teachers who have achieved similar results in teaching children to speed read (even parents who can't speed read themselves can teach it to kids). 2) He improvised a way to teach blind people to speed read in Braille. He even conducted 2 or 3 workshops in Hong Kong for this very purpose and received an award from the government of Hong Kong for his achievement. His fastest Braille speed reader attained a rate of 4,000 wpm with good comprehension 3) He was the first one, that I am aware of, who taught that many of the Learning Disabled can do quite well with speed reading. I have found in my own work that children with such so-called disabilities as ADD, Dyslexia and some others, actually seem gifted when it comes to learning to speed read. Many of these are the very ones who get photographic memories when they master the art of speed reading. These are just three areas in which there is independent verification of the results he claimed. I have seen some of these results in my own work (I haven't attempted the Braille experiment myself yet, but I am aware of the award that the government of Hong Kong gave to Dr. McBride). In fact, in every facet of speed reading that I have experimented with myself, I have also received the same results claimed by Dr. McBride. So, even though I haven't personally verified every experiment that Dr McBride did (yet), I have great faith in the results he claimed. I am hoping that more people will come forward to start making many of his other innovations a universal reality.