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May 11 - June 11, 2020
This book explains why universal educational achievement with equity is possible but also why it cannot be accomplished overnight.
Recently educators have deplored the unfairness of the “digital divide,” a phrase used to signify a gap between students who have ready access to computers and those who do not. But while we strive to overcome such unfairness in material distribution, we should not overlook the much more significant unfairness of the knowledge gap between children from different economic strata.
If we had a choice between offering each child a computer and imparting to each the broad knowledge that enables a person to use a computer intelligently, we should unhesitatingly choose knowledge.
Parents and citizens have the political power to insist on altering received ideas and practices, since without wide public support, no significant educational reform can occur. But in the end, it is the professionals—teachers and administrators—who will carry out the reform.
Thomas Jefferson urged the Virginia legislature to abolish primogeniture—the principle that the advantaged oldest son automatically inherits everything.
The reason that reading ability is the heart of the matter is that reading ability correlates with learning and communication ability. Reading proficiency isn’t in and of itself the magic key to competence. It’s what reading enables us to learn and to do that is critical. In the information age, the key to economic and political achievement is the ability to gain new knowledge rapidly through reading and listening.
Just like reading this book.
Reading proficiency is at the very heart of the democratic educational enterprise, and is rightly called the “new civil rights frontier.”
Our nation was born in the Enlightenment but bred in the Romantic period. Today we most often use the term romantic to refer to romantic love. But romanticism as a broad intellectual movement that has greatly influenced American thought has much less to do with romantic love than with a complacent faith in the benefits of nature.
Do we take the benefits of nature for granted?
Horace Mann is justly praised as the father of public education in the United States, and he rightly saw the need of our schools to bring all children, including recent immigrants, into the main stream of American life. But romantic ideas, especially the idea that nature is best, influenced his belief that the best way to teach early reading—sounding out words from the printed page—is by a “natural,” whole-word approach.
Of course, historians don’t always call these ideas romanticism. They have given them special American names. They call Emerson and Thoreau “Transcendentalists.” They call John Dewey, the father of present-day American education, a “pragmatist” or a “progressive.” But progressivism in education is just another name for romanticism.
the knowledge deficit is a profound failure of social justice. Less understood is the fact that this failure is the consequence of good intentions in the service of inadequate ideas.
Let’s ponder “development” for a moment. When a fertilized egg turns into an embryo, that development is indeed something that unfolds naturally. Similarly, in the first two years of life, when a child learns to walk and talk, those are natural developments that are universal in all cultures. Since the child acquires these extremely difficult skills often without conscious adult instruction, we might mistakenly extend trust in natural unfolding to the next stage of life, when a child enters school. And indeed, that is what educators do when they delay teaching the mechanics of reading until a
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The idea that children might naturally develop a readiness for either place value or the phonic code overlooks the glaring fact that we as a species might never have invented these things at all.
Reading and math are not natural, like walking
Alphabetic writing was a brilliant, momentous invention, and it was equally unnatural. Scholars are still debating whether or not alphabetic writing was invented only once in human history.12
If early childhood experts, liberated from the romantic traditions of American schools, had considered the matter from a historical or anthropological angle, they might have taken stock of the fact that reading is developmentally inappropriate at all ages of human life. There is little in the human organism that prepares us naturally for alphabetic reading and writing (decoding and encoding), which have been very late and rare attainments of civilization. The inherent unnaturalness of learning to read is part of the reason that it is at first so difficult and, for many, so painful.
Learning how to read in the first sense—decoding through phonics—does not guarantee learning how to read in the second sense—comprehending the meaning of what is read.
In a 1785 letter to his nephew, Peter Carr, aged fifteen, Jefferson recommended that he read books (in the original languages and in this order) by the following authors: Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Anabasis, Arian, Quintus Curtius, Diodorus Siculus, and Justin. On morality, Jefferson recommended books by Epictetus, Plato, Cicero, Antoninus, Seneca, and Xenophon’s Memorabilia, and in poetry Virgil, Terence, Horace, Anacreon, Theocritus, Homer, Euripides, Sophocles, Milton, Shakespeare, Ossian, Pope, and Swift.
Emerson
Emerson and Dewey = Romantics
Just like Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Dewey, our schools of education hold that unless school knowledge is connected to “real life” in a “hands-on” way, it is unnatural and dead; it is “rote” and “meaningless.” It consists of “mere facts.”
mistaken dogma that reading is a formal skill that can be transferred from one task to another regardless of subject matter.
For children to make substantial progress in reading, they must make early and substantial progress in knowledge.
Formalism in reading is the notion, powerfully dominant in our schools, that reading comprehension is a skill, like typing, that can be transferred from one text to another. Comprehension skill is said to depend on formal “comprehension strategies,” such as “predicting, summarizing, questioning, and clarifying.” This innocent-seeming idea affects classes all over the nation, depriving them of substance and intellectual structure.
It is not the school staff that is responsible for what is going wrong in the school but the incorrect ideas that have been imposed on the staff—the formalistic theory behind these dull activities.
Reading is not, as romantics hold, either a natural acquisition or a formal skill.
new ideas take hold only when the old professors retire or die.
I completely concur with the desire to gain greater equality of social circumstance for all children. But that pressing social goal does not have to be used as a distraction from our schools’ failure to make a dent in the reading achievement gap between demographic groups. It does no practical good to attack the economic status quo by defending the educational status quo.
There is far too much criticism of teachers and principals for poor educational outcomes that have little to do with their native abilities or their desire to help children and a lot to do with prevailing educational ideas.
Cognitive scientists agree that reading comprehension requires prior “domain-specific” knowledge about the things that a text refers to, and that understanding the text consists of integrating this prior knowledge with the words in order to form a “situation model.”
One aim of this book is to help create a public demand for the kind of knowledge-oriented reading program that is needed.
most of us in the United States desire the same democratic goal—to give all children an opportunity to succeed that depends mainly on their own talents and character and not on who their parents happen to be.
this theory assumes that the education world actually knows how to improve reading scores for all groups and that incentives must be applied because the schools are simply not putting forth the effort needed to help low-income and minority children.
Old people grow blunt; they haven’t time for slow niceties.
turn printed symbols into sounds and words quickly and accurately, a process called decoding.
the best and fastest way to teach decoding is through persistent, explicit instruction, a little at a time, starting no later than kindergarten.
becoming a skilled decoder does not insure that one will become a skilled reader.
We need to see the reading comprehension problem for what it primarily is—a knowledge problem.
progress in language occurs chiefly through listening and talking, not through reading and writing.
discussing challenging material with children—material that is well beyond their ability to decode with understanding—we miss a critical opportunity to increase their knowledge of language and of the world—the kind of knowledge that will prove decisive for reading in later years.
proficient reading and proficient listening both depend on an ability to comprehend language, quite apart from whether the language is expressed orally or in writing.
It is precisely for the sake of reading and writing that we need to place a great deal of emphasis in the early grades on nonwritten, oral activities—on adults reading aloud coherent and challenging material, on discussing it, on having children elaborate on these materials.
As a parent or teacher, we can help our children grasp what reading and writing are like by practicing pretend radio or other audiencedirected speeches.
In the classroom, the teacher can and should ask children frequently to make formal prepared and unprepared presentations to the class. This is the best practice for becoming a good writer and reader that we can devise for young children, because it enacts the communicative situation of reading and writing without involving the arduous process of learning to sound out and form letters accurately and fluently.
Reading comprehension is not a technical skill that must be learned as though the text were a given that drifted down from the sky. It is the other side of knowing how to speak and write in an understandable way to strangers within a particular speech community.
while writing and printing led over time to the refinement of ever more efficient rhetorical techniques, these are fundamentally the same techniques that people have always adopted when they are speaking to large, heterogeneous groups.
we observe from low national reading scores that decoding fluency in grade four, when our children’s scores are moderately high by international standards, does not automatically develop into comprehension fluency in grade twelve, when our students’ scores are low.
Comprehension is not a skill that automatically grows into an ability to cope with complex materials once a child has been given a start with simple ones.
As scientists have probed more deeply into the nature of language comprehension, this kind of result has proved less and less surprising. Researchers have discovered that what the text implies but doesn’t say is a necessary part of its understood meaning. In fact, what the text doesn’t say often far exceeds what it says. The reader or listener has to fill in the blanks and make the unstated connections in order to make sense of the text. This is hardly a new observation. The ancient Greeks knew it, and Aristotle even gave the phenomenon a name—enthymeme, which is technically a syllogism with
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Comprehension skill cannot be automatically transferred from one text to another, because the skill of comprehension is basically the skill of filling in enough of what has been left unsaid—that is, filling in enough blanks—to make sense of the text.
The more a speaker can take for granted, the less he has to say explicitly and the more rapid and concentrated communication can become. Speed is important, because a person can keep in mind only a very few items at a time, which means that richness of meaning is gained by condensing ordinary oral speech.
research has shown a body of specific background knowledge to be necessary for reading proficiency and therefore it should be taught in school. This runs up against the dominant view that the content of schooling should be left up entirely to the individual locality, the individual teacher, or the needs of the individual student and that the content of schooling is in itself far less important than the learning of formal skills such as “reading” and “critical thinking.”
