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Freedom-in-Education Newsletter
May 2006
The subject of the May Newsletter is 'Late Readers'. This is an issue which I think must be of interest to all home educators. When children don't go to school they may not show an inclination to read until they are way beyond the accepted school age for reading, causing the parents great stress and concern. Many adults will judge a child's education by how well they are able to read, and if an education inspector or a doubtful relative sees a ten-year-old still unable to read, it is quite likely that they will consider home education to be a disaster, and put immense pressure on the poor child to learn to read immediately!
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In my opinion, whether a child can read or not is a very bad way of judging how a child's education is coming along. They may not be able to read, but who knows how advanced they are in understanding, and in all the solid foundations of learning, which can't be seen, but on which everything else is built? I didn't learn to read until I was eight, which I actually considered to be rather early, as my brother was quite a few years older than that before he began to read. I think what many people don't consider, or even realise, is that children have very little need to read. Their own imaginations are so vivid they don't need to supplement them with books; they are so capable of ingeniously amusing themselves in any situation, reading isn't necessary, and they are so in the moment, and full of life they feel no need to bury themselves in a world of words.
The main reason why I wanted to read, was so that I could read stories aloud to my younger brother, just as my elder sister did to me - and I sometimes wonder if my brother wouldn't have learnt sooner if there had been another sibling down the line to read to! As it was, he had very little need to read because ever story book in the house was read aloud to him, and the rest of the time he spent playing and learning other things. It was interesting for me to see how difficult reading was for him in all the years he didn't want to do it, and how easy it was for him as soon as he found something he was interested in reading for himself. I guess this is how schools manage to spend so long on the subject, because for most of the children it just isn't the right time.
I think schools couldn't have done a better job of putting people off reading. I know adults who are in their fifties, but still won't read books because of school!
In America, in the times when there was slavery, it was against the law to teach a slave to read, and any slave caught trying would be whipped, or given some other horrible punishment. But this method did not succeed in squashing people's desire to read half as well as school does, and the tales of how the slaves managed to acquire this skill despite all the obstacles are quite amazing. Some would pick up sheets of paper from the gutters and work out at night what all the letters meant, others would find a person who would give them just one lesson, and they would literally learn to read in a day; while others would hide beneath school windows, or beg passers-by to show them what a particular word meant, or find a child returning from school and make him repeat the alphabet, or travel long miles in the dead of night to be taught a few words by another slave! All this proves to me, that you don't have to try and persuade a child to read when the inclination isn't there, because a time is sure to come when one simply can't stop them if one tries! Then what would have taken years to learn, is easily picked up over a few days.
Anyway, I am sure you will enjoy the article below. I hope you have a happy May, and get to see the lovely blackthorn, if it hasn't already been and gone in your area,
Wendy
This article by Gareth Lewis was first
printed in the Green Parent magazine: www.thegreenparent.co.uk
Late Readers
Everyone knows that the earlier a child learns to read, the better they do at school; parents therefore do everything in their power to ensure that their children learn to read as early as possible – often before they even start to attend school.
While this may be fine for some children, it is not for others: many children are simply not ready to learn to read when they are four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, or even ten years old.
The current practice is to give extra reading lessons to children who do not learn to read during their first years at school: this is, no doubt, done with the best intentions, but in effect it means that the less interest a child shows in reading, the more pressure is put upon them to do so – and the more of their time they are forced to spend doing an activity that they do not enjoy. There is an alternative to this approach and this is to regard these children as being ‘late readers’, and therefore not to try to teach them to
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read until they themselves show some inclination to learn.
These two methods are diametrically opposed to each other and, even if one is determined to be open-minded and tolerant of other people’s points of view, one still has to acknowledge that if one approach is right, then the other must be wrong: if it really is the case that some children are late readers then immeasurable harm is being done to them by trying to make them read before they are ready.
A child who is not ready to read, but who is subjected to daily pressure to learn from the age of four or five years old, will, by the age of seven or eight, already have been labelled as having educational difficulties, may have been ‘diagnosed’ as dyslexic, will probably have been made to feel stupid more times than they could ever remember and will probably be so traumatised that they may never learn to read, and will certainly find it difficult to ever really enjoy reading.
If being forced to read when one does not want to is so upsetting, why do so many parents allow their children to be subjected to the ordeal? The answer seems to be that people cannot bring themselves to believe that experts can be wrong: teachers, university professors, government officials, the media, neighbours, friends, and relatives, all combine to agree that a child must be made to learn to read at as young an age as possible, and that if they do fall behind the prescribed level of literacy, they must be bullied to catch up. Parents may feel this to be wrong, but they convince themselves that if all the experts agree, then it must be right.
My own doubts about the infallibility of experts dates back to when I was quite young, and was strengthened by the fact that I studied science at university: an important part of the scientific training is to encourage students to question established dogmas. Recent history provides many examples of academia going off down the wrong track: a false assumption at the outset leading to a whole system of ideas that later proves to be worthless. A famous example of this is provided by the study of animal behaviour: throughout the nineteenth century explorers travelled to the far-flung corners of the globe and returned with exotic animals to be housed in zoos, which then became world-famous centres of learning and research. A new branch of science was built on observing the behaviour of the animals in these zoos; none of it made sense to anyone who really knew anything about animals, but this could be explained by the fact that these animals came from Africa, Asia, or North America, and therefore could not be expected to behave in the same way as European animals.
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It was not until the middle of the twentieth century that common sense could be brought to prevail and that academics could be made to accept that everything that had been observed in zoos represented unnatural behaviour, brought on by the stressful conditions in which the animals were being kept, and that to really understand animals one had to go and study them in their native environment. All the old text books had to be thrown away, and new ones written by people who went out and lived amongst the animals in the wild and who had the strength of mind to forget what they had been taught by the supposed experts on the subject.
This analogy is apt with respect to current ideas about children and reading: the expert knowledge on the subject is based solely on observing children’s progress in schools, and really tells us nothing about how children learn in a more natural and less stressful situation.
My personal perspective on the subject is shaped by the fact that I was a late reader myself: my mother was a primary school teacher and did her best to persuade me to learn to read at the same time as all the other children of my age, but the characters on the page simply made no sense to me. I failed to pass the eleven plus but my mother persuaded the headmaster of my school to overlook this fact and got me admitted to the local grammar school – where, for some reason, reading was no longer an issue for me. Similarly, my own son did not learn to read until he was twelve years old. If I had been sent to a secondary-modern school, and if he had been diagnosed as dyslexic – in accordance with the practices of our respective times – then, no doubt, we would both now still be struggling to come to terms with our educational disadvantages and would be included in the statistics which prove the case for forcing children to learn to read whether they want to or not.
As it is, our cases demonstrate the fickleness of public, and ‘expert’, opinion. The fact that our education was not impaired by our not learning to read when we were meant to, is accepted with equanimity, and even taken as a sign of unusual intelligence. To me this is as bad as being labelled as stupid.
Why can we not simply accept that different children are different? Some children learn to read when they are younger, some when they are older; this is neither a good thing nor a bad thing, it is simply the way that things are. If, as parents and educators, we accept it, then we can be of real help to the children in our care, if we cannot, then we do them harm.
Gareth Lewis
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Curriculum Faire at Wonder Homeschool Wonder Homeschool Curriculum Faire 2006 Looking for curriculum ideas for next year? This is Lucie Smoker's first annual collection of samples and articles by holistic curriculum providers to help you make those tough curriculum choices. Like a collection of books set out on a table, each vendor in the Faire has laid out one page for you to preview. No road trip or admission required to this Faire! |
Your letters and comments are welcome. You can send them to Gareth
Lewis at the following address, or to me at the address beneath:
gareth.lewis@freedom-in-education.co.uk
wendy@freedom-in-education.co.uk