John Holt, the homeschooling/unschooling advocate, wrote that once a child really wants to learn to read for his own reasons, it takes about thirty hours of focused help from someone who knows how.
Holt argues in Instead of Education that we can't fathom this because "S-chools and T-eachers believe, and soon convince the children, that everything that is learned must be T-aught. So the T-eachers must spend hundreds of hours trying to cope with and outwit the kind of children's evasive tactics I wrote about in How Children Fail. They make children anxious and dependent and then say, rightly, how hard it is to deal with their anxiety and dependency. None of this need be."
Herbert Kohl makes a similar argument in Reading, How To. He writes in the preface,
There is no reading problem. There are problem teachers and problem schools. Most people who fail to learn to read in our society are victims of a fiercely competitive system of training that requires failure. If talking and walking were taught in most schools we might end up with as many mutes and cripples as we now have non-readers. However, learning to read is no more difficult than learning to walk or talk. The skill can be acquired in a natural and informal manner and in a variety of settings ranging from school to home to the streets.
Later, in Chapter 2, he writes, "If a youngster fails to acquire the skill or comply with the rules of learning, he or she is considered retarded or criminal, that is, in more polite school language, a learning or behavior problem."
3 comments:
Have you ever read 'Summerhill' by AS Neill, From 1921, but sort of the granddaddy of a lot of current thought on educating children...
No, I haven't read it. But I am familiar with Summerhill school in the UK.
I taught first and second grade in a Philadelphia public school for 30 years. During that time I saw many children learn to read. I say "I saw many children learn to read" rather than "I taught many children to read" because I learned early on that most children do learn to read without much teaching. I kept my students for two years, which allowed me to relax a little when a child didn't become a fluent reader in first grade. I used to say to parents and children, "I don't want to hear anyone say they can't read. You can say 'I'm learning to read' instead." And "Some people learn to read when they're three and some don't learn to read until they're ten, but almost everyone learns to read."
There are some things we teachers can do to help them. For example - reading both poetry and prose to children; having them memorize poems and songs; showing the one-to-one connection between memorized spoken, sung words and those same words printed on a page, and then having the children point to the words as they say/sing them (think of all the people in the past who learned to read from memorizing biblical phrases and pointing to the words); having children read along with books on tape while pointing to the words; showing that words that look the same are the same word and that it helps to remember them; teaching the alphabet (though not always necessary); drawing attention to rhymes both in sound and written form; teaching some sound-symbol relationships but not belaboring it.
Basically, children need time to read. "You learn to read by reading" is what I used to say. I had a time each day when children could just read either alone or with others. Usually I encouraged them to choose books. Sometimes I handed children books I knew they could read so they would get practice (read.) Or I'd pair a beginner with a more experienced reader and the experienced readers ended up helping the beginners to learn. Unfortunately in schools as they exist right now there's little time for this because teachers spend so much time instructing. And at home, with after-school programs, busy schedules, and technology, little time is made for reading (or to practice reading.) It is rare for children to become what I call "real" readers. Over the years I spent very little time on whole-class instruction with the exception of our reading together poems, songs, and their own words (from discussions I transcribed) and doing a brief lesson on something from those. This all took between 15-30 minutes a few times a week. I didn't use basal reading series for instruction, but once in a while a child benefited from the structure either in phonics or repetition of words that a basal gave as they worked their way through some of the series by reading the stories.
Most books about reading push various programs, whether based on phonics or sight words or whole language (a dirty word these days.) In 1985 Edward (Ted) Chittenden, Ann Bussis, Marianne Amarel, and Edith Klausner (all former attendees of the North Dakota Study Group - and some of them founders of the group) wrote a book called "Inquiry Into Meaning: An Investigation of Learning to Read" in which the focus was not the reading programs that were used, but what the children brought to learning to read. Originally published by Erlbaum, it has recently been re-published in an edited second edition by Teachers College Press. The editors are Edward Chittenden and Terry Salinger with Ann Bussis. That study was also interesting because teachers were included in the design of the research and in the data integration. I was proud to have participated in it.
Lynne Strieb
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