Learning All The Time

by John C. Holt

Our professional experts on the teaching of reading have advocated a great many foolish things, but none more foolish than the notion that the way to get children "ready to read" is to show them a lot of books full of nothing but pictures and ask them a lot of silly questions about them.

Children get ready to speak by hearing speech all around them. The important thing about that speech is that the adults for the most part, are not talking in order to give children a model. They are talking to, each other because they have things to say. So the first thing the baby intuits, figures out, about the speech of adults, are that it is serious. Adults talk to make things happen. They talk, and things do happen. The baby thinks, feels, that this is a pretty serious activity, well worth doing.

For children reading (or adults, for that matter), the most important thing is not that they should understand all of what they read. No one does; what we get out of a piece of reading depends in large part on the experience we bring to it. What is important is that children should enjoy their reading enough to want to read more.

What we must do in helping anyone learn to read is to make very clear that writing is an extension of speech, that beyond every written word there is a human voice speaking, and that reading is the way to hear what those voices are saying.