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.
