8 ms·

How bad are childhood literacy rates?

33 points by pseudolus 1y ago

neonate 1y ago
https://archive.md/lru6Q https://archive.md/lru6Q
tbrownaw 1y ago
>>> “A lot of people are thinking about reading in terms of pretty narrow definitions of comprehension,” says Forzani. “But of course we want kids to be able to make inferences and interpretations beyond just literal interpretations, right? We want them to be able to make higher level inferences and to be able to evaluate and critique text.” Forzani points to research from the UK, where reading curriculums were widely reimagined a few years before the US did the same thing. “They shifted attention to really focus on teaching phonics, which is good and important,” she says. “But then they’ve also seen, ‘Wait, we did too much of that focus and now we lost sight of really comprehending at a high level.’” <<< Huh? "Higher level" analysis while have to be built on top of basic comprehension. And how exactly is phonics (very early "what words are on the page") displacing comprehension (much later; something you do with those words once you have them)?
- kazinator 1y ago
  Literacy should probably be defined like this: the person can read and write their language as well as they can speak and listen. Illiterate people possess language, just not reading and writing. Being able to read, write and think deeply, analytically and critically is setting the goalposts beyond literacy. (I understand it's hard to draw hard lines. Literacy affects the degree of language acquisition. People who become literate acquire more language in so doing than people who remain illiterate.)
- nobodyandproud 1y ago
  “They shifted attention to really focus on teaching phonics, which is good and important…we did too much of that focus”. Without knowing the before and after, it’s not safe to say it’s still very early. Few additional weeks? Few additional months? Few additional years? At some point and grade a class should be moving past the time-consuming out-loud reading and pronunciation corrections to timed (and silent, focused) reading; and the ones lagging behind get remedial attention. Otherwise, most of the students are being held back.
  - 7thaccount 1y ago
    Agreed. Phonics is great and how you learn to read, but there is a limit in my opinion. The below is a little long winded, but covers my recent experience with my daughter. I taught my daughter to read when she was 4 and she was reading ~30 page books in kindergarten. Nothing outrageous, but she was pretty far ahead of her class that were still going over ABCs. This was outside of a few other kids who had parents that also taught them to read that were more or less on the same level as her. I didn't bother trying to teach every last freaking phonics rule, I just taught her the different sounds each letter could make and started doing some 2 or 3 letter words each night where we'd sound out different options if the first attempt didn't work. Eventually we talked about "at" versus "ate" and when it mostly made sense to use short and long sounds. I had to relearn some of this myself while going through it. I had to warn her about weird cases a lot, but she caught on super quick. The whole idea though was to get her into those basic 5 page books and then incrementally up the difficulty rather than memorize a thousand rules up front like some poor student taking latin. Phonics is absolutely essential, but I fear that schools go overboard with it.
    - smogcutter 1y ago
      Done properly, phonics shouldn’t be about memorizing rules per se so much as practicing them deliberately, until they are internalized. For some kids, phonics mostly comes naturally. That sounds like your daughter, and myself for example as well. Spelling and pronunciation came easily. I was always the kid who had to flip back to find the page the class was on when it was time turn to read. But our experiences aside, the fact is that if your daughter’s class was doing 3-cueing instead of phonics, many of her classmates simply wouldn’t learn how to read.
    - lelanthran 1y ago
      > Agreed. Phonics is great and how you learn to read, but there is a limit in my opinion. The below is a little long winded, but covers my recent experience with my daughter. My experience matches yours: My child is now 5.5yo, and reads books up to 8 pages in one sitting, consisting of 3 paragraphs per page, with maybe 12-20 words per paragraph. No pictures in any books. Here is the conversation between myself and the pre-school teacher when she brought up that he has trouble reading: Me: What specifically did he have trouble reading? Teacher: Some of the numbers, such as "Eight". Me: I was told you taught reading by phonetics? Teacher: We do. We teach reading by phonetics only. Me: You don't teach by word memorisation at all? Teacher: No, the curriculum is phonetics only until the higher grades. No word memorisation at all! Me: Did you teach the kids how to pronounce 'ight'? Teacher: No, that is only covered in grade 2 and above. Me: So how are the kids supposed to know how to pronounce 'Eight'? Teacher: We teach that. Me: How do you teach that? Teacher: We show them the word next to the number. Me: Isn't that teaching by memorisation of words? TBH, that was effectively the end of the conversation even though it limped along for another few minutes. The teacher remained adamant that they don't teach by the look-see (or any other memorised-word method), but continued giving examples of words the kids are supposed to know because they had lessons with pictures next to words like "fox" and "lamp", etc...
zdragnar 1y ago
[flagged]
mensetmanusman 1y ago
total parent hours spent per child tracks this, no change in literacy when this is controlled for.
- MathMonkeyMan 1y ago
  That's and interesting and sensible claim. Do you remember where you learned that?
- jdpigeon 1y ago
  Hmm, it seems that time spent with children has actually been increasing https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/01/parents-children-parenting-time-spent-work-family-life-balance/ https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/01/parents-children-par...
  - yorwba 1y ago
    That article doesn't cover the period of the decline in reading scores (peak was 2013).
- daymanstep 1y ago
  Do you have a source? I spent a while trying to find a source and couldn't find any.
dec0dedab0de 1y ago
Maybe reading books is less important than ever, and the kids are adapting to the new world. I am reminded of this xkcd, which I just realized Im about a decade behind on. https://xkcd.com/1414/ https://xkcd.com/1414/
- 7thaccount 1y ago
  I understand the gist of the comic, but don't think it truly applies. Each generation has ups and downs compared to those that came before it. In recent times, short tik toks do seem to be detrimental by leading the brain to focus on receiving constant doses of dopamine instead of focusing on something like a book which requires much more focus. I'm not saying the sky is falling, but it's different from the introduction of newspapers and radio and TV and even gaming. In the 60s I guess you'd watch a program with your family at night (like Andy Griffith). You weren't raised on monetized YouTube ads and then watching Tiktok all day. I don't think they're adapting at all, but not learning the necessary skills to hold a job. This isn't all Gen Z, but a lot have trouble focusing for extended periods of time, not to mention challenges with communication and socializing.
- logsr 1y ago
  literacy is only important if you don't want to live a subsistence poverty lifestyle. other than that, completely useless.
  - SchemaLoad 1y ago
    There's not just one kind of literacy though. I have no problem reading books or blog posts on HN, but someone handed me a research article and I realised I struggled to understand it at all and had to re read and concentrate hard. Almost like there was some kind of performative obtuseness to the writing to appeal to an in group of other researchers.
    - logsr 1y ago
      language is one of the basic mechanisms for social differentiation and status. in academia specialized language is how different disciplines are differentiated and abstruse literary references are how people demonstrate their knowledge and status in the field. knowing how to read ("knowing your letters") is not literacy. from an academic perspective the majority of the population is illiterate.
codificare 1y ago
The article tries to claim that we should take those claims with a grain of salt because people have been complaining about kids' literacy rates since time immemorial. The difference is that now it is measurably true. I also think that anecdotal evidence is evidence nonetheless. If teachers active for many years start to ring the bells they are probably onto something, even if the official statistics are yet to come.
- DangitBobby 1y ago
  I reject your characterization of the article. The author of the article starts by acknowledging a historical bias that generations have apparently always had against each other. They then explore, keeping an eye on their own potential biases, the evidence that literacy genuinely appears to be lower in younger generations. I don't know what more you could possibly ask from them.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
SamPatt 1y ago
This seems bad on its face, but I wonder if this is specific to reading comprehension or to all comprehension? If our society moved from text to video as the primary way to transmit information, would our ability to communicate and comprehend the world necessarily be diminished? Text has been around for only a blip compared to oral communication. I love reading, and it feels bad to see it decline, but I'm trying to be open-minded about what comes next.
- WillAdams 1y ago
  The thing is, back before writing became prevalent, Shakespeare would worry that his plays would be plagiarized by someone in the audience watching a performance, then afterwards, writing down the entire thing from memory. Similarly, _The Metamorphoses_, and _The Iliad_, and _The Odyssey_ were part of an oral tradition and their structures were created to as to facilitate memorization and recitation --- how many poems can you recite from memory? Marshall McLuhan warned that each extension of what people can do aided by technology is accompanied by an amputation of what folks will do/learn/be capable of unaided: https://stream.syscoi.com/2019/05/30/marshall-mcluhan-extensions-and-amputations/ https://stream.syscoi.com/2019/05/30/marshall-mcluhan-extens...
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    I couldn't even read those books. Forget about memorizing them.
    - WillAdams 1y ago
      It wasn't that long ago that books were so rare/valuable/difficult to have access to that folks would read and memorize pretty much everything they could lay their hands on.
    - watwut 1y ago
      It is because you read the translation that intentionally translated them into obscure hard to understand and interpret language. So that they poem feels more ancient and "serious" to reader. But originally they were written in the language of the time and in the way that made them easy to remember for contemporaries. They had rhythm, because that is easier to remember. They contained a lot of repetition, because that is easier to remember.
MangoToupe 1y ago
[flagged]
ryao 1y ago
When I was young, I was amazed at how they would try to teach us English grammar and spelling, then have us read books like Huckleberry Finn that undid 6 months to a year worth of English language education. When you are young and you do not really a firm grasp of the right way to do things, being forced to spend substantial time “reading” books that show the wrong way is counterproductive. It was like having a construction crew building a structure by day and a demolition crew destroying it by night. It is a wonder we learned anything at all and it made English tests a hellish experience, since it was never clear what was actually correct. This was on top of English itself being a confusing language (see all of the words ending in ough if you need an example). English teachers seemed to assume we had some magical ability to know the right answer after confusing us with conflicting examples, and we rarely did. It is no wonder back then that they said the same things about us. If they want to improve literacy, they should replace the required reading with books that have no flaws in the spelling and grammar to reinforce English lessons. Then we might see student literacy rise as students stop being so confused.
- HEmanZ 1y ago
  Are you being sarcastic? I completely disagree with you here. Even at a young age people can understand that Huck Finn is a novel told from the perspective of a southern boy in the 1800s, not how you’re “supposed to write” when in another class you have to write and essay about Marie Curie. I think I was like 7 when I could tell this difference. And Huck Finn is for 12-14 year olds. Books like Huck Finn are critical to building the model in your head that every writer has a different perspective, that they will present differently, and even perceive differently. (Is Huck exaggerating to you the reader? This is a critical intuition to get about all writing to make you more literate, not less.) You learn to understand through different writing styles, which is another absolutely critical step in becoming literate. Just thinking about a world where we take your advice above makes my stomach turn it seems so wrong to what the point of reading these books even is…
  - ryao 1y ago
    > Are you being sarcastic? I was serious. I cited Huckleberry Finn because it was the most egregious of the books that were forced on us, but it was by no means the only one. Many examples of incorrect grammar were normalized by books and I hated being forced to read them because I could see how it was confusing me. > Books like Huck Finn are critical to building the model in your head that every writer has a different perspective, that they will present differently, and even perceive differently. I did not learn this. I am in my 30s and I had no idea that this was the point until reading your comment. In hindsight, what I learned from books like this is that nothing made sense since I would be told one thing is correct and then be forced to read things that normalized the opposite and by the time I finished reading, I had forgotten the correct way. Expecting a child that knows nothing and is literally a blank slate to learn this lesson from a forced reading of this book is expecting too much. It certainly was in my case. It is a disservice to the child and is contrary to the goal of establishing English literacy.
smogcutter 1y ago
For my sins, I teach middle school. There’s plenty of different angles on this, but I’d like to highlight a recent one that may not immediately occur to people here without young children: COVID retirements hit the elementary schools particularly hard. Teaching high school on zoom is one thing, now imagine teaching 3rd. So the veteran elementary teachers retired or quit, and there’s no adequate pipeline to replace them, especially in underserved communities. Coming through the system now is a cohort of children whose k-5 teachers have been a rotating cast of subs and ineffective new hires, and it shows.
- 4b11b4 1y ago
  For my sins... I appreciate your deep intentions in that
- ddq 1y ago
  This to me is the most urgent moral issue of the day: our active stunting of our children's development. Our collective misguided and counterproductive approach to pedagogy does not cultivate a learning mindset but rather stifles children's enormous natural aptitude for exploratory play. We are doing it wrong and we know it. The curriculum we use isn't worth paying minimum wage to teach. It could be different. It must be. We have role models to imitate, better methods to follow, resources and tools galore. What is needed now is organization toward common purpose. How does the internet bystander locate effective organizations to disrupt the march of folly? This is a situation where the pilot has gone mad and we must seize control of the aircraft but are too paralyzed by social forces to act.
- donsupreme 1y ago
  At some AI going to be the best teacher for any children
  - sureglymop 1y ago
    Not sure if you're being sarcastic. I don't know about you but the best teachers I ever had were those I felt a personal human connection with. It may have been because they had shown kindness or that they were overly interested in their own subject or something else, but there was a sense of "not wanting to disappoint" the "good teachers" and thus pay more attention and try to excel. I think we are very far from such a personal connection to an AI. If that connection isn't there, there's no real stake.
OgsyedIE 1y ago
One argument I've seen forwarded elsewhere is that school methods have tracked university methods. According to the argument, watering down standards to increase retention (and revenue) gained legitimacy in the sixties as the higher education act empowered administrators to increase the size of their ranks and policy views at colleges across the country. These colleges trained education majors according to their new philosophy, who became a new rank of principals and superintendents in the eighties and onwards, promulgating the transactional and nihilistic view of the purpose of teaching. On the one hand, it sounds farfetched. On the other hand, all five of the teachers and professors over 50 whom I've raised the topic to over the years agreed wholeheartedly.
GregDavidson 1y ago
I learned to read by being read to: typically on a relative's lap with the book in my lap. They were not trying to teach me how to read, but my language centers took care of the job, just like they did for spoken language, long before schools could muck it up. Reading has always been fast and effortless for me, requiring no conscious attention - again, just like spoken language. Much later I studied the linguistics of language, grammar, spelling systems, etc. which revealed the wonders of our natural language skills. I recommend the natural method for everyone. Be sure to check for eyesight problems, though.

33 points by pseudolus 1y ago

https://archive.md/lru6Q https://archive.md/lru6Q

>>> “A lot of people are thinking about reading in terms of pretty narrow definitions of comprehension,” says Forzani. “But of course we want kids to be able to make inferences and interpretations beyond just literal interpretations, right? We want them to be able to make higher level inferences and to be able to evaluate and critique text.” Forzani points to research from the UK, where reading curriculums were widely reimagined a few years before the US did the same thing. “They shifted attention to really focus on teaching phonics, which is good and important,” she says. “But then they’ve also seen, ‘Wait, we did too much of that focus and now we lost sight of really comprehending at a high level.’” <<< Huh? "Higher level" analysis while have to be built on top of basic comprehension. And how exactly is phonics (very early "what words are on the page") displacing comprehension (much later; something you do with those words once you have them)?

kazinator 1y ago
Literacy should probably be defined like this: the person can read and write their language as well as they can speak and listen. Illiterate people possess language, just not reading and writing. Being able to read, write and think deeply, analytically and critically is setting the goalposts beyond literacy. (I understand it's hard to draw hard lines. Literacy affects the degree of language acquisition. People who become literate acquire more language in so doing than people who remain illiterate.)
nobodyandproud 1y ago
“They shifted attention to really focus on teaching phonics, which is good and important…we did too much of that focus”. Without knowing the before and after, it’s not safe to say it’s still very early. Few additional weeks? Few additional months? Few additional years? At some point and grade a class should be moving past the time-consuming out-loud reading and pronunciation corrections to timed (and silent, focused) reading; and the ones lagging behind get remedial attention. Otherwise, most of the students are being held back.
- 7thaccount 1y ago
  Agreed. Phonics is great and how you learn to read, but there is a limit in my opinion. The below is a little long winded, but covers my recent experience with my daughter. I taught my daughter to read when she was 4 and she was reading ~30 page books in kindergarten. Nothing outrageous, but she was pretty far ahead of her class that were still going over ABCs. This was outside of a few other kids who had parents that also taught them to read that were more or less on the same level as her. I didn't bother trying to teach every last freaking phonics rule, I just taught her the different sounds each letter could make and started doing some 2 or 3 letter words each night where we'd sound out different options if the first attempt didn't work. Eventually we talked about "at" versus "ate" and when it mostly made sense to use short and long sounds. I had to relearn some of this myself while going through it. I had to warn her about weird cases a lot, but she caught on super quick. The whole idea though was to get her into those basic 5 page books and then incrementally up the difficulty rather than memorize a thousand rules up front like some poor student taking latin. Phonics is absolutely essential, but I fear that schools go overboard with it.
  - smogcutter 1y ago
    Done properly, phonics shouldn’t be about memorizing rules per se so much as practicing them deliberately, until they are internalized. For some kids, phonics mostly comes naturally. That sounds like your daughter, and myself for example as well. Spelling and pronunciation came easily. I was always the kid who had to flip back to find the page the class was on when it was time turn to read. But our experiences aside, the fact is that if your daughter’s class was doing 3-cueing instead of phonics, many of her classmates simply wouldn’t learn how to read.
  - lelanthran 1y ago
    > Agreed. Phonics is great and how you learn to read, but there is a limit in my opinion. The below is a little long winded, but covers my recent experience with my daughter. My experience matches yours: My child is now 5.5yo, and reads books up to 8 pages in one sitting, consisting of 3 paragraphs per page, with maybe 12-20 words per paragraph. No pictures in any books. Here is the conversation between myself and the pre-school teacher when she brought up that he has trouble reading: Me: What specifically did he have trouble reading? Teacher: Some of the numbers, such as "Eight". Me: I was told you taught reading by phonetics? Teacher: We do. We teach reading by phonetics only. Me: You don't teach by word memorisation at all? Teacher: No, the curriculum is phonetics only until the higher grades. No word memorisation at all! Me: Did you teach the kids how to pronounce 'ight'? Teacher: No, that is only covered in grade 2 and above. Me: So how are the kids supposed to know how to pronounce 'Eight'? Teacher: We teach that. Me: How do you teach that? Teacher: We show them the word next to the number. Me: Isn't that teaching by memorisation of words? TBH, that was effectively the end of the conversation even though it limped along for another few minutes. The teacher remained adamant that they don't teach by the look-see (or any other memorised-word method), but continued giving examples of words the kids are supposed to know because they had lessons with pictures next to words like "fox" and "lamp", etc...

zdragnar 1y ago

[flagged]

mensetmanusman 1y ago

total parent hours spent per child tracks this, no change in literacy when this is controlled for.

MathMonkeyMan 1y ago
That's and interesting and sensible claim. Do you remember where you learned that?
jdpigeon 1y ago
Hmm, it seems that time spent with children has actually been increasing https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/01/parents-children-parenting-time-spent-work-family-life-balance/ https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/01/parents-children-par...
- yorwba 1y ago
  That article doesn't cover the period of the decline in reading scores (peak was 2013).
daymanstep 1y ago
Do you have a source? I spent a while trying to find a source and couldn't find any.

dec0dedab0de 1y ago

Maybe reading books is less important than ever, and the kids are adapting to the new world. I am reminded of this xkcd, which I just realized Im about a decade behind on. https://xkcd.com/1414/ https://xkcd.com/1414/

7thaccount 1y ago
I understand the gist of the comic, but don't think it truly applies. Each generation has ups and downs compared to those that came before it. In recent times, short tik toks do seem to be detrimental by leading the brain to focus on receiving constant doses of dopamine instead of focusing on something like a book which requires much more focus. I'm not saying the sky is falling, but it's different from the introduction of newspapers and radio and TV and even gaming. In the 60s I guess you'd watch a program with your family at night (like Andy Griffith). You weren't raised on monetized YouTube ads and then watching Tiktok all day. I don't think they're adapting at all, but not learning the necessary skills to hold a job. This isn't all Gen Z, but a lot have trouble focusing for extended periods of time, not to mention challenges with communication and socializing.
logsr 1y ago
literacy is only important if you don't want to live a subsistence poverty lifestyle. other than that, completely useless.
- SchemaLoad 1y ago
  There's not just one kind of literacy though. I have no problem reading books or blog posts on HN, but someone handed me a research article and I realised I struggled to understand it at all and had to re read and concentrate hard. Almost like there was some kind of performative obtuseness to the writing to appeal to an in group of other researchers.
  - logsr 1y ago
    language is one of the basic mechanisms for social differentiation and status. in academia specialized language is how different disciplines are differentiated and abstruse literary references are how people demonstrate their knowledge and status in the field. knowing how to read ("knowing your letters") is not literacy. from an academic perspective the majority of the population is illiterate.

codificare 1y ago

The article tries to claim that we should take those claims with a grain of salt because people have been complaining about kids' literacy rates since time immemorial. The difference is that now it is measurably true. I also think that anecdotal evidence is evidence nonetheless. If teachers active for many years start to ring the bells they are probably onto something, even if the official statistics are yet to come.

DangitBobby 1y ago
I reject your characterization of the article. The author of the article starts by acknowledging a historical bias that generations have apparently always had against each other. They then explore, keeping an eye on their own potential biases, the evidence that literacy genuinely appears to be lower in younger generations. I don't know what more you could possibly ask from them.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

SamPatt 1y ago

This seems bad on its face, but I wonder if this is specific to reading comprehension or to all comprehension? If our society moved from text to video as the primary way to transmit information, would our ability to communicate and comprehend the world necessarily be diminished? Text has been around for only a blip compared to oral communication. I love reading, and it feels bad to see it decline, but I'm trying to be open-minded about what comes next.

WillAdams 1y ago
The thing is, back before writing became prevalent, Shakespeare would worry that his plays would be plagiarized by someone in the audience watching a performance, then afterwards, writing down the entire thing from memory. Similarly, _The Metamorphoses_, and _The Iliad_, and _The Odyssey_ were part of an oral tradition and their structures were created to as to facilitate memorization and recitation --- how many poems can you recite from memory? Marshall McLuhan warned that each extension of what people can do aided by technology is accompanied by an amputation of what folks will do/learn/be capable of unaided: https://stream.syscoi.com/2019/05/30/marshall-mcluhan-extensions-and-amputations/ https://stream.syscoi.com/2019/05/30/marshall-mcluhan-extens...
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  I couldn't even read those books. Forget about memorizing them.
  - WillAdams 1y ago
    It wasn't that long ago that books were so rare/valuable/difficult to have access to that folks would read and memorize pretty much everything they could lay their hands on.
  - watwut 1y ago
    It is because you read the translation that intentionally translated them into obscure hard to understand and interpret language. So that they poem feels more ancient and "serious" to reader. But originally they were written in the language of the time and in the way that made them easy to remember for contemporaries. They had rhythm, because that is easier to remember. They contained a lot of repetition, because that is easier to remember.

MangoToupe 1y ago

[flagged]

ryao 1y ago

When I was young, I was amazed at how they would try to teach us English grammar and spelling, then have us read books like Huckleberry Finn that undid 6 months to a year worth of English language education. When you are young and you do not really a firm grasp of the right way to do things, being forced to spend substantial time “reading” books that show the wrong way is counterproductive. It was like having a construction crew building a structure by day and a demolition crew destroying it by night. It is a wonder we learned anything at all and it made English tests a hellish experience, since it was never clear what was actually correct. This was on top of English itself being a confusing language (see all of the words ending in ough if you need an example). English teachers seemed to assume we had some magical ability to know the right answer after confusing us with conflicting examples, and we rarely did. It is no wonder back then that they said the same things about us. If they want to improve literacy, they should replace the required reading with books that have no flaws in the spelling and grammar to reinforce English lessons. Then we might see student literacy rise as students stop being so confused.

HEmanZ 1y ago
Are you being sarcastic? I completely disagree with you here. Even at a young age people can understand that Huck Finn is a novel told from the perspective of a southern boy in the 1800s, not how you’re “supposed to write” when in another class you have to write and essay about Marie Curie. I think I was like 7 when I could tell this difference. And Huck Finn is for 12-14 year olds. Books like Huck Finn are critical to building the model in your head that every writer has a different perspective, that they will present differently, and even perceive differently. (Is Huck exaggerating to you the reader? This is a critical intuition to get about all writing to make you more literate, not less.) You learn to understand through different writing styles, which is another absolutely critical step in becoming literate. Just thinking about a world where we take your advice above makes my stomach turn it seems so wrong to what the point of reading these books even is…
- ryao 1y ago
  > Are you being sarcastic? I was serious. I cited Huckleberry Finn because it was the most egregious of the books that were forced on us, but it was by no means the only one. Many examples of incorrect grammar were normalized by books and I hated being forced to read them because I could see how it was confusing me. > Books like Huck Finn are critical to building the model in your head that every writer has a different perspective, that they will present differently, and even perceive differently. I did not learn this. I am in my 30s and I had no idea that this was the point until reading your comment. In hindsight, what I learned from books like this is that nothing made sense since I would be told one thing is correct and then be forced to read things that normalized the opposite and by the time I finished reading, I had forgotten the correct way. Expecting a child that knows nothing and is literally a blank slate to learn this lesson from a forced reading of this book is expecting too much. It certainly was in my case. It is a disservice to the child and is contrary to the goal of establishing English literacy.

smogcutter 1y ago

For my sins, I teach middle school. There’s plenty of different angles on this, but I’d like to highlight a recent one that may not immediately occur to people here without young children: COVID retirements hit the elementary schools particularly hard. Teaching high school on zoom is one thing, now imagine teaching 3rd. So the veteran elementary teachers retired or quit, and there’s no adequate pipeline to replace them, especially in underserved communities. Coming through the system now is a cohort of children whose k-5 teachers have been a rotating cast of subs and ineffective new hires, and it shows.

4b11b4 1y ago
For my sins... I appreciate your deep intentions in that
ddq 1y ago
This to me is the most urgent moral issue of the day: our active stunting of our children's development. Our collective misguided and counterproductive approach to pedagogy does not cultivate a learning mindset but rather stifles children's enormous natural aptitude for exploratory play. We are doing it wrong and we know it. The curriculum we use isn't worth paying minimum wage to teach. It could be different. It must be. We have role models to imitate, better methods to follow, resources and tools galore. What is needed now is organization toward common purpose. How does the internet bystander locate effective organizations to disrupt the march of folly? This is a situation where the pilot has gone mad and we must seize control of the aircraft but are too paralyzed by social forces to act.
donsupreme 1y ago
At some AI going to be the best teacher for any children
- sureglymop 1y ago
  Not sure if you're being sarcastic. I don't know about you but the best teachers I ever had were those I felt a personal human connection with. It may have been because they had shown kindness or that they were overly interested in their own subject or something else, but there was a sense of "not wanting to disappoint" the "good teachers" and thus pay more attention and try to excel. I think we are very far from such a personal connection to an AI. If that connection isn't there, there's no real stake.

OgsyedIE 1y ago

One argument I've seen forwarded elsewhere is that school methods have tracked university methods. According to the argument, watering down standards to increase retention (and revenue) gained legitimacy in the sixties as the higher education act empowered administrators to increase the size of their ranks and policy views at colleges across the country. These colleges trained education majors according to their new philosophy, who became a new rank of principals and superintendents in the eighties and onwards, promulgating the transactional and nihilistic view of the purpose of teaching. On the one hand, it sounds farfetched. On the other hand, all five of the teachers and professors over 50 whom I've raised the topic to over the years agreed wholeheartedly.

GregDavidson 1y ago

I learned to read by being read to: typically on a relative's lap with the book in my lap. They were not trying to teach me how to read, but my language centers took care of the job, just like they did for spoken language, long before schools could muck it up. Reading has always been fast and effortless for me, requiring no conscious attention - again, just like spoken language. Much later I studied the linguistics of language, grammar, spelling systems, etc. which revealed the wonders of our natural language skills. I recommend the natural method for everyone. Be sure to check for eyesight problems, though.