My Response to the American Public Media Report, “Hard Words: Why Our Kids Aren’t Being Taught to Read”

The gist of the situation reported in the American Public Media text and broadcast, “Hard Words: Why Our Kids Aren’t Being Taught How to Read,” found in the immediately posted material as you scroll on down this blog, tallies with my reading of neuroscientific research concerning the young child. 

 

The best book that I have ever read that covers a multiplicity of topics on brain development during the first five years of life is Lise Eliot’s What’s Going on in There?: How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life, (New York:  Bantam, 2000), with implications, then, for kindergarteners. 

 

The overwhelming preponderance of the neuroscientific evidence is that the young child needs all sorts of adult-delivered direct instruction, in words first of all in the aural environment of one’s infancy, toddler stage, and during ages 3-5;  then direct impartation of instruction in phonics:  letters, sounds, syllables, and word construction, including two and three letter combinations (th, thr, sh, shr);  proceeding then to sentence and paragraph construction.

 

Then, as children have mastered word decoding and sentence and paragraph instruction, she and he need to read a great diversity of literature in key subject areas and genres of fiction and nonfiction:  poems, short stories, drama, novels;  history, government, economics, psychology, and the natural sciences (the basics of biology, chemistry and physics even at K-5).

 

My experience teaching students whose parents have sought me out in desperation is that the most critical problem is lack of vocabulary development from failure to gain exposure to a diversity and range of knowledge-intense subject area study.  I regularly find that into the high school and even collegiate level, students (particularly those who come from families of generational poverty and low education;  and those who speak a non-English language at home) will not know the meaning of words that many of us take for granted:   democracy, rural, urban, industrial, agricultural;  let alone truly college-preparatory and college-level vocabulary such as nadir, apostasy, maniacal, prescient, myopic.

 

Thus, the problem is two-fold:  lack of instruction in reading fundamentals, as discussed in the excellent article to which you provided the link;  and knowledge-poor education as young people proceed into upper elementary, middle school, and high school, so that even if they manage to graduate and matriculate on a post-secondary campus they are not genuinely prepared for college or university study:  They have little knowledge, underdeveloped skills, and extremely limited vocabularies.

 

This falls hardest on young people mired in poverty at the urban core, to which we historically herded people via restricted housing covenants.

 

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The article also trains a harsh spotlight on education professors, whom as you know I distain:

 

Far from being the critical thinkers and lifelong learners that their mantra would suggest, they are intellectually lazy and have little capacity for astute critical analysis.  They proceed on misguided belief systems, many of them traceable to the 1920s, embedding themselves in what E. D. Hirsch has dubbed both a “Thoughtworld” and “The Impenetrable Fortress.”

 

Education professors have ruined generations of teachers and administrators who overwhelmingly serve---  ill-serve--- our precious young people, relegating youth of vast potential to lives of early pregnancy, bad habits and addictions, and mean streets leading to early death or confined to those latter-day plantations we call prisons.

 

It’s just that serious.