Even at her most preposterous, Evelyn Wood never claimed that her students could read books without even glancing at the pages. Her finger-pacing system required students to trace lines down text, as fast as they could turn the pages. But a new craze called Quantum Reading takes the old Wood claims to the next level, insisting it can teach kids to read books by simply flipping pages.
This latest speed-reading nonsense is attracting wide attention in China, where a video of a reading competition went viral in October, quickly attracting 140 million views. The children in the video, aged six to twelve, were said to have studied the Quantum Speed-Reading, or QSR, method, which purports to teach students to read 100,000 characters in about five minutes.
That’s a rate claimed by only the most fervent devotees of Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics. (Most college-educated adults read between 200 and 400 wpm.) As I wrote in my book, Scan Artist, Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin said he could read 20,000 wpm after taking a Wood course in 1961. But the Wood method made him move his finger down text before turning pages. QSR kids just flip through a volume, like shuffling cards.
QSR earned a fresh burst of attention from the video, but it’s been around for more than a decade. The system is based on the work of a Japanese woman, Yumiko Tobitani, whose 2006 book, Quantum Speed-Reading: Awakening Your Child’s Mind, was translated into English and released in the US by Hampton Roads Publishing. The book appears to be out-of-print – orders through Amazon cost triple its original $14.95 price– but I was able to see a copy in a library.
Like Evelyn Wood, Tobitani presented no scientific evidence for her method, relying instead on testimonials from satisfied students. In the case of QSR, these endorsements come from children. One second-grader reported flipping through Stephen Hawking’s The Universe in a Nutshell and sending Dr. Hawking a letter to tell him that he’d “overlooked something.” The child said he’d comprehended the book by receiving “good images” from it “like having an antenna on my head.”
As with Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics, preposterous claims are cloaked in scientific-sounding jargon. Tobitani described herself as a teacher at the Shichida Child Academy in Japan, where great emphasis was placed on “activating the right brain” so that children flipping through a book would be “picking up the thought vibrations emanating from it,” somehow translating these into understandable information. According to Tobitani, the child need not understand the language of the text in order to understand it.
Speed-reading never has come cheap. An Evelyn Wood course, adjusted for inflation, always cost at least one thousand dollars. QSR, taught at training centers in Beijing, Hangzhou and Shenzhen and elsewhere in China, can range from 6,000 yuan ($860) for a half-year of training to 260,000 yuan ($37,000) for lifetime enrollment.
Modern-day Asia has been far more skeptical of these outlandish speed-reading claims than mid-century America ever was. While debunkers of Evelyn Wood’s method were largely ignored by the US media from the early 1960s until the late Seventies, the recent QSR video has sparked a dozen critical media reports. China Daily and the South China Morning Post, among other outlets, have run comments from scientists and education experts calling the Quantum Reading method “nonsense” and “groundless.”
To be sure, the circumstances are not comparable. Evelyn Wood’s method was endorsed by political figures and celebrities, while authorities in Sichuan province are said to have taken a dim view of the QSR video. According to the South China Morning Post, “cyber police” shared the competition video on the social media site Weibo with the comment, “New scam?”
A report about the flap on Jiemian.com, a Chinese website about business and finance, links to a New York Post story about my book, Scan Artist. It’s heartening to know that my own work has been noticed in China and that skeptics are on the case.
