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In 2010, Penguin Books named The Read-Aloud Handbook one of the seventy-five most important books it published in its seventy-five-year history.
The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together. —Eric Hoffer
His mother and father had been giving him and his younger brother free prep classes all through their childhoods, from infancy into adolescence: They read to them for thirty minutes a night, year after year, even after they learned how to read for themselves.
Other select high schools have had to make lunch periods mandatory because so many students feel every period of the day must be filled with something that will reflect positively on their college application/résumé, and somehow lunch doesn’t fit that bill.18 Where
Of course, for every parent who is pressing children’s stress buttons, there is the other extreme—the ones who think the job of education is the responsibility of teachers. These parents far outnumber the pushy ones, and they create another kind of problem.
If Bianca isn’t proof enough for you, consider this: Since 1956, no newspaper, network, or news agency has a better record for predicting the outcomes in presidential elections than Weekly Reader, the late national classroom magazine.
“I cannot think of a single instance in which the improvement in achievement was not tied, at least in part, to an increase in the amount of time students had to learn.”21 I’ve been saying the same thing for as many years. You either extend the school day (as have the successful KIPP charter schools)22 or you tap into the 7,800 hours at home.
Contrary to the current screed that blames teachers for just about everything wrong in schooling,24 research shows that the seeds of reading and school success (or failure) are sown in the home, long before the child ever arrives at school.
If schooling’s objective is to create lifetime readers who continue to read and educate themselves after they graduate and then they fail to do so, that’s a major indictment of the process.
Seventy-four percent of community college students never achieve a diploma and 43 percent of students of four-year public colleges never graduate.
The commission spent two years poring through thousands of research projects conducted in the previous quarter century, and in 1985 issued its report, Becoming a Nation of Readers. Among its primary findings, two simple declarations rang loud and clear: “The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children.”14 “It is a practice that should continue throughout the grades.”15 The commission found conclusive evidence to support reading aloud not only in the home but also in the classroom.
Indeed, almost everything Finland does contradicts what some experts in America advocate: Most mothers work outside the home; most children are in child care by age one; school begins at age seven and then only for half days; children remain in the same school from age seven to age sixteen; there are no gifted programs; class size often reaches thirty; there are fifteen minutes of recess for every forty-five-minute class (Finnish students spend less time in class than any other developed nation); there is no national curriculum and no standardized testing until age sixteen; all meals are free,
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Research shows that even when children reach primary grades, repeated picture book reading of the same book (at least three times) increases vocabulary acquisition by 15 to 40 percent, and the learning is relatively permanent.
Let me make an analogy here. Inside a child’s brain there is a huge reservoir called the Listening Vocabulary. You could say it’s the child’s very own Lake Pontchartrain, the famous estuary outside New Orleans that overflowed because of all the water brought by Hurricane Katrina. That extra water breached the levees and tragically flooded New Orleans. We want the same thing to happen but not in a tragic way—this time the levees will be breached inside the child’s brain. The first levee would be the Speaking Vocabulary. You pour enough words into the child’s Listening Vocabulary and it will
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The one prekindergarten skill that matters above all others, because it is the prime predictor of school success or failure, is the child’s vocabulary upon entering school. Yes, the child goes to school to learn new words, but the words he already knows determine how much of what the teacher says will be understood. And since most instruction for the first four years of school is oral, the child who has the largest vocabulary will understand the most, while the child with the smallest vocabulary will grasp the least.
If there were a national time shortage, the malls would be empty, Netflix would be defunct, and the cable-TV companies would be bankrupt.
BACK in September 1950, at the dawn of the great television decade, Motorola ran a series of national ads in which it promised a TV in the home would bring families closer and improve student grades.
We’re all born inattentive and have to learn attentiveness with age and experience, growing increasingly attentive to our important multiple needs if we need to.
Stulman concluded that many students are too immature to handle the distractions and temptations of the Internet, a fact largely un-addressed by those who think wiring the school is like wiring the brain. More than a few school districts that have handed laptops to their high school students have learned that digital connections do not hurry maturity.15
Even Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, meeting shortly before Jobs’s death in 2011, “agreed that, so far, computers had made surprisingly little impact on schools.”22 Maybe all of that is why the private Waldorf schools in and around Silicone Valley are brimming with the children of executives and engineers from tech firms like Apple, Yahoo, and Google. The Waldorf philosophy is simple: no tech gadgets in the primary school. Their curriculum is about hands-on creativity and learning; the tech stuff can wait until high school or later. More incredible, the tech parents sign on and so do their kids.23
