I think another problem (based on my observations as an elementary school teacher in Northern Virginia) is that kids don’t have any time to read. Too scheduled and stressed. So many activities!
I know very few people, young or old, who read for pleasure. I still do it. My grown son is too busy with kids and work. My child friends are not very interested in reading books. A boy was helping me make a fire and we were using newspapers. He saw the comics page and said, "Oh look. Memes." I said they were called comics. He read the Garfield one and laughed.
That reminded me that my son learned to read by reading Garfield books over and over. Comics are way under-rated as gateways to reading.
Vidiots, heroin, mercyless cold turkey, get rid of the ipads and chromebooks mandated in the school, get them reading books by using books for everything. Our masters want the data from us all, so they want us all connected 24/7. Look around everyone is contemplating their own navel, getting their zombie feed in their isolation chamber.
If you read to your child every day from Day 1, you should be able to implant a love of reading before the schools can stamp it out. If you don't have time to read/feed/otherwise care for your child, don't have one.
I read to my child from a baby. We read books everyday, we went to the library regularly and have 100s of picture books and chapter books now as she has got older at time. I read a lot and she sees me reading a lot. Despite this, school still managed to stamp out a love of reading in her. She has now been out of school for 15 months, is 8 years old and I am beginning to see a love of reading return to her.
Andrea Beatrice Reed, more than 35 years ago I would have agreed with both you and boyd stewart conklin who commented above. I have been a so called “bookworm” all my life. I wanted my kids to love books as well. I read to them at least twice a day, as many books as they wanted to hear, from infancy.
Both went to traditional classroom school and ONLY read what was required.
I was baffled as I thought I had done “all the things”. For reference, this was before the iPad, iPhone, and computers in every home days. Our family limited television viewing and extra curricular activities so it wasn’t over scheduling...I can only attribute it to something that happened in the classroom...”teaching to the test”, textbooks that have so many photos, graphs, charts and other images that make them almost unreadable, and more homework than is necessary are a few of the things that come to mind.
I have hope for my grands. I’m homeschooling them for their parents...we are following their lead trying hard to teach what sparks their curiosity. It’s easy to shift a planned lesson when something interesting comes up during the day. Often these shifts result in deeper dives in a different but more interesting direction. Luckily, because of my reading habit, I have hundreds of reference books in my home library. Only time will tell but I hope they too, will love reading. The ultimate goal is for them to be self motivated lifetime learners.
It’s not a guarantee. Some kids will grow up to love reading and others won’t. My son devoured lots of books in elementary school, and then moved away from reading for fun until well into his twenties.
I read classics to my son from age five to some time in his teens and it was wonderful, and yet he's not an avid reader of books today. He reads online, like many, however, and is better "educated" than most of his schooled peers. While I wouldn't have traded our reading time for anything, my guess is that parents today read more to their children than did parents in the 1950s, 60s or 70s, and yet reading was a more common pastime back then. Yes, it was prior to the smart phone, but television was big. I think Peter's right that the long slog of conventional schooling is the major culprit here. We're just not used to putting ourselves in children's shoes and seeing school through their eyes.
I observed this is my child. She attended school for just over 2 years (UK) and when I took her out of school she was capable of reading and had good reading skills. But showed little interest in reading. While at school, she would refuse to read the 'reading scheme' books sent home. We continued to read picture books together at home. Since being home educated she has had opportunities to read that occur naturally in her day to day life and when something interests her - reading in a computer game, reading about her favourite movie characters on a wiki fan page, reading facts in non-fiction books. But she rarely read for pleasure. I put no pressure on her and ensured there were books available that might interest her. She is 8 years old and I took her out of school 15 months ago. She has just read her first chapter book, based on a tv show she loves. I am gradually seeing a love of reading return in her.
The noted change between second grade and third grade with the enjoyment of reading aligns with what I've noticed anecdotally, as a mom while I was raising my daughter. Most second graders still like school. But ask fourth graders and there are plenty who hate it.
I've also long wondered if the "schoolofying" of reading —accelerated reading programs, and the like—turning reading into homework, also makes it utterly unappealing as a leisure activity. When I meet little kids who say they "hate reading" I want to tell their parents to yank them out school and get them a library card instead and maybe an Audible subscription, too.
Spot on: reading suffers from its association with school. This is clear with math but for some reason we find it harder to detect with reading. Yet it makes complete sense that when you put as much pressure on the acquisition of a skill as school puts on reading, and you test and test and test, the learner is naturally going to hate the activity. If we looked at things through children's eyes more often this would be abundantly obvious.
I read a stat recently that said that if you teach a child to read via word memorization, by fourth grade they can read about 1600 words. Teach them phonics and by the same age they can read 24,000 words. Guess which kids are going to enjoy reading more?
I’ve read enough Gatto that I’m convinced that these awful curricula are killing the joy of reading on purpose. The elites want workers, not thinkers, and if we do read for fun, they want us reading nonsense, not things that would actually inspire us to make something more of ourselves than cogs for the wheel of big corporations.
I agree that the emphasis on test results has likely had a big impact on this, though I also think that the kids who really enjoyed reading for fun in early elementary will likely return to it when they are older. That said, a lot of kids may never discover the joy of reading at all because of how much pressure they are under in school (and way too much screen time). Parents should be reading aloud with their kids, and not stop when they are able to read independently. Family read-alouds, even one chapter or one picture book a day. It only takes a few minutes a day and can have a positive impact in so many ways—reading and listening skills, critical thinking, connection.
Enjoyment from pastimes is not pie: you can have many activities you do for fun, and enjoyment from one does not prevent enjoyment from another. Many of us who grew up during times when children and adults read more developed a love of reading AND a love of movies or even--gasp!--television. It's so easy to blame screens but the choice to do so always strikes me as an attempt to let adults off the hook in one way or another. I think associating reading with testing and other forms of pressure is a much more plausible culprit.
I am not blaming screens. I enjoy movies and video games and reading and all sorts of things too. We did all of those things with our kids growing up, and now they have plenty of varied interests. But I do think that too much screen time (especially on phones and tablets) can be a detriment to reading, especially for younger children.
A couple of years ago, the principal of our K-4 village school proudly shared with the school board at a public meeting that 22 out of 30 students were reading below proficient. Proudly!
When asked how that could happen, she said (1) that kindergartners aren't starting school "prepared", (2) that COVID was to blame, and (3) that they really didn't know how to teach kids to read.
Her first "reason" is probably related to the push of academics in kindergarten as well as the lack of parents reading to their children, as you point out. It looks like this push started in the 1990s and especially after No Child Left Behind in 2001. Common Core in 2010 didn't help, either.
Her second "reason" did not actually hold true in New Hampshire. The downward trend started prior to 2020. But why look at facts when you can simply blame something.
Her third "reason" shocked me. They, writ large, don't know how to teach reading. But when I thought about it, I realized she hadn't actually been taught how to teach kids to read. So many teachers were trained in "Balanced Literacy", otherwise known as the Lucy Calkins method. These teachers were not trained to teach phonics, and they're still the same teachers out there. Sure, states are offering phonics as professional development, but I know teachers who didn't see the need to learn it.
What comes across in your comment are the usual terms of the debate: "How should we teach children to read?", instead of, "Should we be teaching children to read at all?" From where I stand, as soon as you make something the responsibility of school, you take a lot of the naturalness out of it. As Ahmed Chicktay said, "At school, we unlearn how to learn naturally."
I was just commenting on this article with a situation that happened to me. We should teach children to read when they want to learn to read. Some pick it up on their own, some want direction. But in no case should we be forcing kids to learn to read when they are not developmentally ready for it. And yet, that's what schools do. It's no wonder so few people enjoy reading anymore. It's a chore. It's what you do in school.
I agree that we should never force reading on a child, but I doubt many children would spontaneously ask for direction or instruction if they weren't growing up in a country that famously demands all five and six year-olds be reading well. They understand the pressure and don't want to succumb to the dreaded "falling behind." In a more child-centered society we would know that many children who learn to read "late" become avid readers, and we'd see that there's very little need for formal reading instruction.
I work in a Project-based community school and one practice we brought on board several years ago is DEAR (drop everything and read). It's a protected 30 minutes where kids read a book of their choosing - they aren't tested on it or assessed in anyway Our only rule for DEAR is quiet so that kids can really sink into their reading. I see kids in our program go towards books when they have downtime and to say that they enjoy reading. I really do think this simple practice helps them see reading as something pleasurable and for its own sake. I agree with you completely that the way we set schools and academic tasks up for kids has a huge impact on the relationship they develop to things like reading.
Great topic and wonderful questions you are asking. Thank you! I have been a kindergarten and first grade teacher and now I am a reading interventionist in the primary grades. My daughters were both born in the early 1990's -- when 1/2 day kindergarten was play based and truly was a place for children to learn how to share and care. In addition, kindergarten was a place where children learned how to be a part of a larger group, listen, actively participate, while being exposed to a variety of subjects in authentic, meaningful ways.
As a second career, I got my masters in elementary education in the mid 2000's during a time when kindergarten was shifting from 1/2 day to full day across the nation. With a whole day of instruction, districts and legislators were making decisions that impacted kindergarten in a way that in my view did not improve it -- turning it into the new first grade. It was the beginning of the era of No Child Left Behind. With a new mandate to teach systematic sequential phonics instruction to kindergarteners, drilling and killing left brain type activities with children who are primarily still right-brained based -- the left brain doesn't fully come online until age 6 and 7 -- this is why Finland is so successful with literacy. I know at this time there was also a significant portion of teachers using whole language instruction to teach reading, but there was also a big push to teach phonics earlier and earlier. And in the 2010-2020s teaching phonics to pre-schoolers became commonplace. This push to teach systematic, sequential direct instruction earlier and earlier did not produce better results, but instead created a generation of students who began to see themselves as not able to read. I also believe when we teach these skills too early it re-wires the brain in inefficient ways, producing dyslexia like symptoms when dyslexia would not have been a factor -- Just research the rise in special education needs across the nation. I'm not a scientist or researcher, this is my experience and hypothesis.
Not only was kindergarten becoming the new first grade, but to borrow from Sebastian Junger's title of his book, "A Perfect Storm" - this is what was brewing in the education field with the introduction of the smart phone and other handheld devices like ipads in 2011 or 2012. Toddlers were being introduced to hand-held media and hijacking their attention, while at the same time interrupting their normal physical development. Less time crawling on the floor, playing with 3-dimensional toys like blocks, puzzles, etc. impacted the progression of their development in ways that negatively impacted their attention ability to achieve sustained focus and also their ocular and fine motor skills, and development of their core strength. Too much screen time can impact the integration of their proprioceptive and vestibular systems as well as their primitive reflexes -- all of this negatively impacts their ability to read. It now has become physically too demanding to sit up, scan text across the page, and read.
There is a lot to think about -- with regard to the development of a child, so much is taken for granted. Typical early childhood has been interrupted across the board. Parents also have less time to read to their children. They are not only stretched too thin with demanding work or second jobs, but they too are distracted by the online world.
I am now a grandmother. My grand daughter is now 2 years old and loves books. She gets no screen time and luckily her parents read to her every night. Her parents understand that stories are important. Telling them and reading them. They aren't on social media and rarely watch tv. My grand daughter is lucky. I am wishing her a lifetime of discovery of the joy of reading. Growing up will be challenging in the world that we live in today. It won't always be so easy once she goes to school. I do hope change is on the horizon.
One of the major causes of the rise in diagnoses that lead to special ed is that learning "disabilities" have become not only big business but a way to pathologize children's inability to sit still for long periods. If it's the child's fault, then it's not the system's. Carry on and more of the same sedentary, industrial "curriculum" that keeps generating jobs. It's not about children, and it never was.
As a child I remember my mum reading to me and loving it. So much so that I still have the purple book that holds many Little Golden Book stories in it. My favourite being Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Bears.
I also have a strong memory of trying to get out of going to school in year 2 simply because I had to read aloud to someone. It seems that that memory as well as other less desirable ones around reading stuck throughout my schooling years as I never had the desire to pick up a book and read. That was until I read Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now which a girlfriend sent me after the passing of my mum. There were so many jaw dropping moments as I read, that my attitude towards reading shifted. I’m still not a huge reader at the age of 44 (I much prefer to listen to an audio book or watch a movie if non-fiction) but when I do pick up a book it’s definitely because I want to.
Watching my own boys journey with reading has given me even further insights. I definitely read to my children when they were little but became less and less as I had more children and as life got busy. It was always available to them but I found the interest in general wasn’t there.
After going down a tough road with my second son where I was forcing him to read in my efforts to get his reading skills up so he could succeed at school, I thankfully discovered the world of unschooling. 8 years since I now get the pleasure of watching my children come to reading in a way that works for them. My 10 year old who has had the least amount of exposure to school is now wanting to learn to read and experiences much joy in the process. The part that still rubs though is the idea that this can only happen at school. An idea that he has taken on from those around us whose only option was to learn it at school when the school was ready, not the child. My son has decided to try school on this year and is enjoying the activities that are aimed at supporting this skill set but going by what he is sharing, he is enjoying the energy of the teacher. I really hope this continues but much of me highly doubts it given his friends who are in school hate reading.
For me it’s not about being attached to my children’s love of one activity or another. Being in love with how we choose to use our time is what matters most. And sometimes that means not being in love which leads to choosing a different activity. I can’t help but think if we just took the pressure away from reading and just did the activity ourselves if we find such value in it then children are way more likely to feel inspired to learn and play with the activity in a way that lights them up. And in my experience that is what keeps the activity alive.💗
As you know, for most of human history children learned in mixed-age groups through play, participation, and immersion in real community life. What they learned mattered because it was embedded in lived experience. Age segregation and tightly standardised curricula are very recent inventions in evolutionary terms.
Agriculture introduced hierarchy and predictability; industrialisation amplified standardisation; the technical era layered on metrics and performance tracking. What we are seeing now is not simply reform. It is the continued industrialisation of childhood — another tightening of systems that prioritise compliance and measurability over curiosity.
But I wonder if this is part of a broader ecological thinning of childhood — and of humanity itself. Intrinsic motivation flourishes under conditions of autonomy, meaningful contribution, and cross-generational connection. Yet children’s autonomy has steadily contracted. Their days are tightly scheduled, their reading increasingly measured, their time largely spent among same-age peers rather than in mixed-age communities that include adolescents, adults, and elders engaged in real life. At the same time, childhood has become intensely supervised. In the effort to prevent harm, children are rarely unsupervised, rarely trusted with real freedom of movement, and often subject to continuous monitoring. Even when well-intentioned, this atmosphere of constant oversight reshapes experience. It replaces trust with vigilance, exploration with caution.
Much of this restructuring has been driven by risk minimisation — fear of crime, fear of predators, fear of unsupervised spaces. In trying to eliminate low-probability dangers, we may have unintentionally dismantled the everyday community conditions that human beings instinctively expect.
When fundamental relational instincts are chronically constrained, people don’t become healthier. They don’t simply become less motivated — they become anxious, alienated, and reactive, more prone to anger, withdrawal, distrust, and the quiet erosion of social cohesion. They become sicker.
If joy in reading is declining, perhaps the deeper issue isn’t children’s motivation. As you’ve argued for years, children are naturally driven to learn. The question may be whether we have redesigned childhood environments in ways that thin out the very social and psychological conditions that allow intrinsic motivation to thrive.
If that is true, then the solution may not lie only in educational reform, but in rebuilding community itself — tearing down the invisible barriers between us as well as the physical ones. Coming together as neighbours again. Replacing sections of fences with gates. Growing shared fruit and vegetables. Creating spaces where children see adults and elders not as distant authorities but as members of the same living community. Social cohesion doesn’t return through policy; it returns when people reconnect in tangible, everyday ways.
In fact, the data suggests that the more students read in school and the more teachers curate the reading, the more readers are created. And that is also my anecdotal experience.
I watch the documentary that was more or less teachers nowadays talking about generation X and how horrible they are at reading and how most of them can’t read by fifth grade and that they have no interest in reading. They have no use for it and they’re not learning it which is very very very sad.
I think another problem (based on my observations as an elementary school teacher in Northern Virginia) is that kids don’t have any time to read. Too scheduled and stressed. So many activities!
I know very few people, young or old, who read for pleasure. I still do it. My grown son is too busy with kids and work. My child friends are not very interested in reading books. A boy was helping me make a fire and we were using newspapers. He saw the comics page and said, "Oh look. Memes." I said they were called comics. He read the Garfield one and laughed.
That reminded me that my son learned to read by reading Garfield books over and over. Comics are way under-rated as gateways to reading.
Vidiots, heroin, mercyless cold turkey, get rid of the ipads and chromebooks mandated in the school, get them reading books by using books for everything. Our masters want the data from us all, so they want us all connected 24/7. Look around everyone is contemplating their own navel, getting their zombie feed in their isolation chamber.
If you read to your child every day from Day 1, you should be able to implant a love of reading before the schools can stamp it out. If you don't have time to read/feed/otherwise care for your child, don't have one.
I read to my child from a baby. We read books everyday, we went to the library regularly and have 100s of picture books and chapter books now as she has got older at time. I read a lot and she sees me reading a lot. Despite this, school still managed to stamp out a love of reading in her. She has now been out of school for 15 months, is 8 years old and I am beginning to see a love of reading return to her.
Andrea Beatrice Reed, more than 35 years ago I would have agreed with both you and boyd stewart conklin who commented above. I have been a so called “bookworm” all my life. I wanted my kids to love books as well. I read to them at least twice a day, as many books as they wanted to hear, from infancy.
Both went to traditional classroom school and ONLY read what was required.
I was baffled as I thought I had done “all the things”. For reference, this was before the iPad, iPhone, and computers in every home days. Our family limited television viewing and extra curricular activities so it wasn’t over scheduling...I can only attribute it to something that happened in the classroom...”teaching to the test”, textbooks that have so many photos, graphs, charts and other images that make them almost unreadable, and more homework than is necessary are a few of the things that come to mind.
I have hope for my grands. I’m homeschooling them for their parents...we are following their lead trying hard to teach what sparks their curiosity. It’s easy to shift a planned lesson when something interesting comes up during the day. Often these shifts result in deeper dives in a different but more interesting direction. Luckily, because of my reading habit, I have hundreds of reference books in my home library. Only time will tell but I hope they too, will love reading. The ultimate goal is for them to be self motivated lifetime learners.
It’s not a guarantee. Some kids will grow up to love reading and others won’t. My son devoured lots of books in elementary school, and then moved away from reading for fun until well into his twenties.
I read classics to my son from age five to some time in his teens and it was wonderful, and yet he's not an avid reader of books today. He reads online, like many, however, and is better "educated" than most of his schooled peers. While I wouldn't have traded our reading time for anything, my guess is that parents today read more to their children than did parents in the 1950s, 60s or 70s, and yet reading was a more common pastime back then. Yes, it was prior to the smart phone, but television was big. I think Peter's right that the long slog of conventional schooling is the major culprit here. We're just not used to putting ourselves in children's shoes and seeing school through their eyes.
I observed this is my child. She attended school for just over 2 years (UK) and when I took her out of school she was capable of reading and had good reading skills. But showed little interest in reading. While at school, she would refuse to read the 'reading scheme' books sent home. We continued to read picture books together at home. Since being home educated she has had opportunities to read that occur naturally in her day to day life and when something interests her - reading in a computer game, reading about her favourite movie characters on a wiki fan page, reading facts in non-fiction books. But she rarely read for pleasure. I put no pressure on her and ensured there were books available that might interest her. She is 8 years old and I took her out of school 15 months ago. She has just read her first chapter book, based on a tv show she loves. I am gradually seeing a love of reading return in her.
The noted change between second grade and third grade with the enjoyment of reading aligns with what I've noticed anecdotally, as a mom while I was raising my daughter. Most second graders still like school. But ask fourth graders and there are plenty who hate it.
I've also long wondered if the "schoolofying" of reading —accelerated reading programs, and the like—turning reading into homework, also makes it utterly unappealing as a leisure activity. When I meet little kids who say they "hate reading" I want to tell their parents to yank them out school and get them a library card instead and maybe an Audible subscription, too.
Spot on: reading suffers from its association with school. This is clear with math but for some reason we find it harder to detect with reading. Yet it makes complete sense that when you put as much pressure on the acquisition of a skill as school puts on reading, and you test and test and test, the learner is naturally going to hate the activity. If we looked at things through children's eyes more often this would be abundantly obvious.
I read a stat recently that said that if you teach a child to read via word memorization, by fourth grade they can read about 1600 words. Teach them phonics and by the same age they can read 24,000 words. Guess which kids are going to enjoy reading more?
I’ve read enough Gatto that I’m convinced that these awful curricula are killing the joy of reading on purpose. The elites want workers, not thinkers, and if we do read for fun, they want us reading nonsense, not things that would actually inspire us to make something more of ourselves than cogs for the wheel of big corporations.
https://petergray.substack.com/p/92-the-reading-wars-why-natural-learning
Thank you!
I agree that the emphasis on test results has likely had a big impact on this, though I also think that the kids who really enjoyed reading for fun in early elementary will likely return to it when they are older. That said, a lot of kids may never discover the joy of reading at all because of how much pressure they are under in school (and way too much screen time). Parents should be reading aloud with their kids, and not stop when they are able to read independently. Family read-alouds, even one chapter or one picture book a day. It only takes a few minutes a day and can have a positive impact in so many ways—reading and listening skills, critical thinking, connection.
Enjoyment from pastimes is not pie: you can have many activities you do for fun, and enjoyment from one does not prevent enjoyment from another. Many of us who grew up during times when children and adults read more developed a love of reading AND a love of movies or even--gasp!--television. It's so easy to blame screens but the choice to do so always strikes me as an attempt to let adults off the hook in one way or another. I think associating reading with testing and other forms of pressure is a much more plausible culprit.
I am not blaming screens. I enjoy movies and video games and reading and all sorts of things too. We did all of those things with our kids growing up, and now they have plenty of varied interests. But I do think that too much screen time (especially on phones and tablets) can be a detriment to reading, especially for younger children.
School never wanted my opinion, they wanted to verify that I noticed the things THEY felt were important.
so true
A couple of years ago, the principal of our K-4 village school proudly shared with the school board at a public meeting that 22 out of 30 students were reading below proficient. Proudly!
When asked how that could happen, she said (1) that kindergartners aren't starting school "prepared", (2) that COVID was to blame, and (3) that they really didn't know how to teach kids to read.
Her first "reason" is probably related to the push of academics in kindergarten as well as the lack of parents reading to their children, as you point out. It looks like this push started in the 1990s and especially after No Child Left Behind in 2001. Common Core in 2010 didn't help, either.
Her second "reason" did not actually hold true in New Hampshire. The downward trend started prior to 2020. But why look at facts when you can simply blame something.
Her third "reason" shocked me. They, writ large, don't know how to teach reading. But when I thought about it, I realized she hadn't actually been taught how to teach kids to read. So many teachers were trained in "Balanced Literacy", otherwise known as the Lucy Calkins method. These teachers were not trained to teach phonics, and they're still the same teachers out there. Sure, states are offering phonics as professional development, but I know teachers who didn't see the need to learn it.
What comes across in your comment are the usual terms of the debate: "How should we teach children to read?", instead of, "Should we be teaching children to read at all?" From where I stand, as soon as you make something the responsibility of school, you take a lot of the naturalness out of it. As Ahmed Chicktay said, "At school, we unlearn how to learn naturally."
I was just commenting on this article with a situation that happened to me. We should teach children to read when they want to learn to read. Some pick it up on their own, some want direction. But in no case should we be forcing kids to learn to read when they are not developmentally ready for it. And yet, that's what schools do. It's no wonder so few people enjoy reading anymore. It's a chore. It's what you do in school.
I agree that we should never force reading on a child, but I doubt many children would spontaneously ask for direction or instruction if they weren't growing up in a country that famously demands all five and six year-olds be reading well. They understand the pressure and don't want to succumb to the dreaded "falling behind." In a more child-centered society we would know that many children who learn to read "late" become avid readers, and we'd see that there's very little need for formal reading instruction.
Sometimes a kid wants to read to you. They will get direction at that point, especially if they're stuck. To me, that's them asking for direction.
I work in a Project-based community school and one practice we brought on board several years ago is DEAR (drop everything and read). It's a protected 30 minutes where kids read a book of their choosing - they aren't tested on it or assessed in anyway Our only rule for DEAR is quiet so that kids can really sink into their reading. I see kids in our program go towards books when they have downtime and to say that they enjoy reading. I really do think this simple practice helps them see reading as something pleasurable and for its own sake. I agree with you completely that the way we set schools and academic tasks up for kids has a huge impact on the relationship they develop to things like reading.
Great topic and wonderful questions you are asking. Thank you! I have been a kindergarten and first grade teacher and now I am a reading interventionist in the primary grades. My daughters were both born in the early 1990's -- when 1/2 day kindergarten was play based and truly was a place for children to learn how to share and care. In addition, kindergarten was a place where children learned how to be a part of a larger group, listen, actively participate, while being exposed to a variety of subjects in authentic, meaningful ways.
As a second career, I got my masters in elementary education in the mid 2000's during a time when kindergarten was shifting from 1/2 day to full day across the nation. With a whole day of instruction, districts and legislators were making decisions that impacted kindergarten in a way that in my view did not improve it -- turning it into the new first grade. It was the beginning of the era of No Child Left Behind. With a new mandate to teach systematic sequential phonics instruction to kindergarteners, drilling and killing left brain type activities with children who are primarily still right-brained based -- the left brain doesn't fully come online until age 6 and 7 -- this is why Finland is so successful with literacy. I know at this time there was also a significant portion of teachers using whole language instruction to teach reading, but there was also a big push to teach phonics earlier and earlier. And in the 2010-2020s teaching phonics to pre-schoolers became commonplace. This push to teach systematic, sequential direct instruction earlier and earlier did not produce better results, but instead created a generation of students who began to see themselves as not able to read. I also believe when we teach these skills too early it re-wires the brain in inefficient ways, producing dyslexia like symptoms when dyslexia would not have been a factor -- Just research the rise in special education needs across the nation. I'm not a scientist or researcher, this is my experience and hypothesis.
Not only was kindergarten becoming the new first grade, but to borrow from Sebastian Junger's title of his book, "A Perfect Storm" - this is what was brewing in the education field with the introduction of the smart phone and other handheld devices like ipads in 2011 or 2012. Toddlers were being introduced to hand-held media and hijacking their attention, while at the same time interrupting their normal physical development. Less time crawling on the floor, playing with 3-dimensional toys like blocks, puzzles, etc. impacted the progression of their development in ways that negatively impacted their attention ability to achieve sustained focus and also their ocular and fine motor skills, and development of their core strength. Too much screen time can impact the integration of their proprioceptive and vestibular systems as well as their primitive reflexes -- all of this negatively impacts their ability to read. It now has become physically too demanding to sit up, scan text across the page, and read.
There is a lot to think about -- with regard to the development of a child, so much is taken for granted. Typical early childhood has been interrupted across the board. Parents also have less time to read to their children. They are not only stretched too thin with demanding work or second jobs, but they too are distracted by the online world.
I am now a grandmother. My grand daughter is now 2 years old and loves books. She gets no screen time and luckily her parents read to her every night. Her parents understand that stories are important. Telling them and reading them. They aren't on social media and rarely watch tv. My grand daughter is lucky. I am wishing her a lifetime of discovery of the joy of reading. Growing up will be challenging in the world that we live in today. It won't always be so easy once she goes to school. I do hope change is on the horizon.
One of the major causes of the rise in diagnoses that lead to special ed is that learning "disabilities" have become not only big business but a way to pathologize children's inability to sit still for long periods. If it's the child's fault, then it's not the system's. Carry on and more of the same sedentary, industrial "curriculum" that keeps generating jobs. It's not about children, and it never was.
Well said.
As a child I remember my mum reading to me and loving it. So much so that I still have the purple book that holds many Little Golden Book stories in it. My favourite being Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Bears.
I also have a strong memory of trying to get out of going to school in year 2 simply because I had to read aloud to someone. It seems that that memory as well as other less desirable ones around reading stuck throughout my schooling years as I never had the desire to pick up a book and read. That was until I read Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now which a girlfriend sent me after the passing of my mum. There were so many jaw dropping moments as I read, that my attitude towards reading shifted. I’m still not a huge reader at the age of 44 (I much prefer to listen to an audio book or watch a movie if non-fiction) but when I do pick up a book it’s definitely because I want to.
Watching my own boys journey with reading has given me even further insights. I definitely read to my children when they were little but became less and less as I had more children and as life got busy. It was always available to them but I found the interest in general wasn’t there.
After going down a tough road with my second son where I was forcing him to read in my efforts to get his reading skills up so he could succeed at school, I thankfully discovered the world of unschooling. 8 years since I now get the pleasure of watching my children come to reading in a way that works for them. My 10 year old who has had the least amount of exposure to school is now wanting to learn to read and experiences much joy in the process. The part that still rubs though is the idea that this can only happen at school. An idea that he has taken on from those around us whose only option was to learn it at school when the school was ready, not the child. My son has decided to try school on this year and is enjoying the activities that are aimed at supporting this skill set but going by what he is sharing, he is enjoying the energy of the teacher. I really hope this continues but much of me highly doubts it given his friends who are in school hate reading.
For me it’s not about being attached to my children’s love of one activity or another. Being in love with how we choose to use our time is what matters most. And sometimes that means not being in love which leads to choosing a different activity. I can’t help but think if we just took the pressure away from reading and just did the activity ourselves if we find such value in it then children are way more likely to feel inspired to learn and play with the activity in a way that lights them up. And in my experience that is what keeps the activity alive.💗
As you know, for most of human history children learned in mixed-age groups through play, participation, and immersion in real community life. What they learned mattered because it was embedded in lived experience. Age segregation and tightly standardised curricula are very recent inventions in evolutionary terms.
Agriculture introduced hierarchy and predictability; industrialisation amplified standardisation; the technical era layered on metrics and performance tracking. What we are seeing now is not simply reform. It is the continued industrialisation of childhood — another tightening of systems that prioritise compliance and measurability over curiosity.
But I wonder if this is part of a broader ecological thinning of childhood — and of humanity itself. Intrinsic motivation flourishes under conditions of autonomy, meaningful contribution, and cross-generational connection. Yet children’s autonomy has steadily contracted. Their days are tightly scheduled, their reading increasingly measured, their time largely spent among same-age peers rather than in mixed-age communities that include adolescents, adults, and elders engaged in real life. At the same time, childhood has become intensely supervised. In the effort to prevent harm, children are rarely unsupervised, rarely trusted with real freedom of movement, and often subject to continuous monitoring. Even when well-intentioned, this atmosphere of constant oversight reshapes experience. It replaces trust with vigilance, exploration with caution.
Much of this restructuring has been driven by risk minimisation — fear of crime, fear of predators, fear of unsupervised spaces. In trying to eliminate low-probability dangers, we may have unintentionally dismantled the everyday community conditions that human beings instinctively expect.
When fundamental relational instincts are chronically constrained, people don’t become healthier. They don’t simply become less motivated — they become anxious, alienated, and reactive, more prone to anger, withdrawal, distrust, and the quiet erosion of social cohesion. They become sicker.
If joy in reading is declining, perhaps the deeper issue isn’t children’s motivation. As you’ve argued for years, children are naturally driven to learn. The question may be whether we have redesigned childhood environments in ways that thin out the very social and psychological conditions that allow intrinsic motivation to thrive.
If that is true, then the solution may not lie only in educational reform, but in rebuilding community itself — tearing down the invisible barriers between us as well as the physical ones. Coming together as neighbours again. Replacing sections of fences with gates. Growing shared fruit and vegetables. Creating spaces where children see adults and elders not as distant authorities but as members of the same living community. Social cohesion doesn’t return through policy; it returns when people reconnect in tangible, everyday ways.
In fact, the data suggests that the more students read in school and the more teachers curate the reading, the more readers are created. And that is also my anecdotal experience.
I watch the documentary that was more or less teachers nowadays talking about generation X and how horrible they are at reading and how most of them can’t read by fifth grade and that they have no interest in reading. They have no use for it and they’re not learning it which is very very very sad.