#92. The Reading Wars: Why Natural Learning Fails in Classrooms*

The best practices for teaching reading in school do not mimic natural learning.

FamilyFirst/Freerange

Dear friends,

Progressive educators have always believed that methods of classroom instruction should be based on children’s natural ways of learning, the ways children learn in life, when not in classrooms. This has led to a variety of meaning-centered ways of teaching, which run counter to what we might call the process-centered ways of so-called traditional instruction.

For example, in teaching arithmetic, the progressive educator might set up conditions aimed at helping children discover, or at least understand, the purpose and meaning of multiplication. In contrast, the traditionalist might drill children on the multiplication tables and later teach a step-by-step algorithm for multiplying two-digit numbers, with little or no attention to the question of why anyone would be interested in multiplication or why the algorithm works.

In teaching reading, the progressive educator might focus on ways to help beginners recognize and thereby read whole words from the outset and allow them to figure out or guess at other words from the context (such as from pictures and the meaning of adjacent words), so they are reading for meaning right from the beginning. In contrast, the traditionalist might start with lessons on letter recognition and the relation of letters to sounds (phonics) before moving on to whole words and sentences. The process of reading requires the decoding of letters into sounds, and the traditionalist teaches this process explicitly before becoming concerned with meaning.

This letter is about the teaching and learning of reading. I’m going to argue that the ways that children learn to read naturally, in life outside of the classroom, fail when they are imported into a conventional school classroom. Let’s start with children who teach themselves to read before they reach school age.

Precocious Readers

Roughly 1% of children, referred to as precocious readers, read fluently by the age of four, without deliberate instruction (Olson et al., 2005). I have witnessed this phenomenon twice, as my youngest brother and my son were both precocious readers. (I, in contrast, was among the poorest readers in my class through at least third grade). It is not obvious how they learned, though I’ll share some thoughts on that below, but I assure you that nobody systematically taught them. They were read to a lot, they were surrounded by reading materials and by people who read, and they used a wide variety of clues to teach themselves to read.

Researchers have conducted systematic case studies of precocious readers, through interviews of parents, and have compared them with other children to see if they are unique in any ways other than their early reading (e.g., Olson et al., 2005; Margarin, 2005). The results of such studies, overall, support the following conclusions:

• Precocious reading does not depend on unusually high IQ or any specific personality trait. Although some precocious readers have IQ scores in the gifted range, many others score about average. Personality tests likewise reveal no consistent differences between precocious readers and other children.

• Precocious reading is not strongly linked to social class. Some studies have found it to be as frequent in blue-collar as in white-collar families. However, it does seem to depend on growing up in a family where reading is a common and valued activity.

• Parents of precocious readers report that they or an older sibling often read to the child but did not in any systematic way attempt to teach reading. In the typical case, the parents at some point discovered, to their surprise, that their child was reading, at least in a preliminary way, and then they fostered that reading by providing appropriate reading materials, answering the child’s questions about words, and in some cases pointing out the relationship between letters and sounds to help with unfamiliar words. In essentially no cases, however, did they provide anything like the systematic training in either word recognition or phonics that might occur in school.

In sum, precocious readers appear to be children who grow up in a literate home and, for some unknown reason (unlike even their siblings in the same home), develop an intense early interest in reading. Interest, not unusual brain development, is what distinguishes them from others. Because they are interested and strongly motivated, they use whatever cues are available to figure out the meanings of printed words and sentences, and, along the way, with or without help, consciously or unconsciously, they infer the underlying phonetic code and use it to read new words. For them, reading for meaning comes first, before phonics. In the words of one set of researchers), “[The precocious readers] were not taught the prerequisite skills of reading such as phoneme-grapheme correspondence or letter-naming skills but, instead, learned to read familiar, meaningful sight vocabulary; the rules of reading were not explicitly taught but apparently inferred over time.” (Olson et al., 2006).

Here is what I observed with my son, who could read quite well by the time he was three years old, or just a couple of months later. I was a graduate student who, when home, was spending most of my time reading. His mother was also a big reader and often read to him. My guess is that, by the time he was two, he had deduced that reading is what people do in this world into which he was born, so he better figure out how to do it. When we were out of the house (in Manhattan), we carried him around in a back carrier, so he could see over our shoulder wherever we went. One of his first words, when he began speaking, was “whasthatsay,” as he pointed to a word on a sign, or at breakfast a word on a cereal box. We (his mother and/or I) of course would tell him.

Soon he was recognizing words and saying them aloud when he saw them. He developed in this way a very large sight vocabulary. By the time he was three years and two months, it was clear to his mother and me that he was reading new words correctly, which he had never asked us about. Somehow—and this is the mystery to me—he had inferred the phonetics sufficiently to read words and whole sentences that he had never seen before.

One of the first bits of evidence, to me, that he could read phonetically came when we were visiting a town square in New England. After looking at the Civil War monument, he came over to me and asked, “Why would men fight and die to save an onion?” Clearly, he had read the word union phonetically, the way it should sound if English phonetic rules were consistent. He was at that time 3 years and 2 months old.

The fact that precocious readers learn to read relatively quickly, so early in life, with no evidence of stress and much evidence of pleasure, suggests that learning to read is not very difficult when a person really wants to do it. The real constraint on learning to read (or, I would argue, learning almost anything) is interest. When the interest is there, you can’t stop kids from learning unless you lock them in closets.

Learning to Read by Unschoolers and Democratic Schoolers

In a report some years ago (here) I presented a qualitative analysis of case histories of learning to read by children in unschooling families (who don’t send their children to school or teach a curriculum at home) and by children at the Sudbury Valley School (where students are in charge of their own education and there is no imposed curriculum or instruction). I won’t repeat that work in detail here, but, in brief, some of the main conclusions were these:

1. Children in these settings learned to read at a wide variety of ages.

2. At whatever age they learned, they learned quite quickly when they were truly motivated to learn.

3. Attempts by parents to teach reading to unmotivated children generally failed and sometimes seemed to set learning backwards.

4. Being read to and engaging in meaningful ways with literary material with more skilled readers (older children or adults) facilitated learning.

In sum, these children apparently learned to read in essentially the same ways that precocious readers learn, but at a wide variety of ages. They learned when and because they became interested in reading, and they used whatever information was available to help them, including information provided by people who already knew how to read. They were not systematically taught, and the people who helped them by responding to their questions generally had no training or expertise in the teaching of reading.

The Reading Wars and the Failure of Progressive Methods in Standard Schools

We turn now from self-motivated children learning to read out of school to children who are taught in school, where the assumption is that they must learn to read at a certain age and in a certain way, whether they want to or not. In school, learning to read appears to be unnatural and difficult. It occurs at a snail’s pace, incrementally over several years. Even after three or four years of training many children are not fluent readers (as was the case for me).

Progressive educators have always argued that learning to read should not be slow and tedious. They have argued for “whole word” and “whole language” methods of teaching reading, which, they claim, are more natural and pleasurable than phonics-first methods. Although the progressive educators commonly think of themselves as proposing something new, contrasted with “traditional education,” the progressive arguments go back at least to the origin of compulsory schooling in America.

Horace Mann, the first secretary of education in any state in the union, who oversaw the passage of the first state compulsory education law (in Massachusetts, in 1852), fought for the whole-word approach and railed against phonics. In the early 20^th century John Dewey and progressive educators inspired by him were the champions of holistic, reading-for-meaning approaches. Later, in the 1970s and ‘80s, Kenneth Goodman and Frank Smith took up the torch and promoted what they called the whole-language approach.

On the other side are those who have long argued that phonics is the key to reading and should be taught early and directly. Noah Webster, sometimes referred to as the “Father of American Scholarship and Education,” was an early warrior in the phonics camp. In the late 18^th century, he created the first series of books designed to teach reading and spelling in secular schools, and they were founded on phonics.

In the mid 20^th century, Rudolph Flesch turned the tide back toward phonics with his bestselling book, Why Johnny Can’t Read (1955). He argued convincingly that the progressive movement had produced a serious decline in reading ability in American schoolchildren because it ignored phonics. In the most recent three or four decades, among the leading proponents of phonics are educational researchers who base their argument on experiments and data more than theory. Many carefully controlled experiments have by now been conducted to compare the reading scores of children taught by different methods in different classrooms, and the results of the great majority of them favor phonics (e.g., Kim, 2008).

Because of their intensity and presumed importance, these debates about how to teach reading have long been dubbed “the Reading Wars.” Today, the majority (though not all) of the experts who have examined the data have declared that the wars are over, and phonics has won. The data seem clear. Overall, children who are taught phonics from the beginning become better readers, sooner, than those who are taught by whole-world or whole-language methods. The learning is still slow and tedious, but not as slow and tedious for phonics learners as for those taught by other methods.

Why Natural Learning Fails in Classrooms

So, we have this puzzle. Out of school, children learn to read by what appear to be a whole-word, whole-language methods. They read right off for meaning and they learn to recognize whole words and read whole passages before they pay much attention to individual letters or their sounds. Phonics comes later, based on inferences that may be conscious or unconscious. Learning to read out of school is in some ways like learning, in infancy, your native oral language; you learn it, including the rules, with little awareness that you are learning it and little awareness of the rules that underlie it. But that doesn’t work well for learning to read in school. Learning there is better if you master the rules (the rules relating letters to sounds) before attending much to meaning.

The mistake of those who have pushed for whole-word or whole-language reading in conventional schools, I think, has been to assume that the classroom is or can be a natural learning environment. It isn’t, and (except in unusual circumstances) it can’t be. The classroom is a setting where you have a rather large group of children, all about the same age, and a teacher whose primary tasks are to keep order and impart a curriculum—the same curriculum for everyone. In that setting, the teacher decides what to do, not the students. If students decided, they would all decide on different things and there would be chaos.

No matter how liberal-minded the teacher is, real, prolonged self-direction and self-motivation is not possible in the standard classroom. In this setting, children must suppress their own interests, not follow them. While children out of school learn what and because they want to, children in school must learn or go through the motions of learning what the teacher wants them to learn in the way the teacher wants them to learn it. The result is slow, tedious, shallow learning that is about procedure, not meaning, regardless of the teacher’s intent.

The classroom is all about training. Training is the process of getting reluctant organisms to do or learn what the trainer wants them to do or learn. Under those conditions, methods that focus on the mechanical processes underlying reading—the conversion of sights to sounds—work better than methods that attempt to promote reading through meaning, which requires that students care about the meaning, which requires that they be able to follow their own interests, which is not possible in the classroom.

Concluding Thoughts

Does this explanation fit with the ways that you or your children learned, in or out of school, or doesn’t it? In my own family of origin, I can site three examples that fit this story. I was taught reading by the “look and say” whole-word method with Dick and Jane books, and I couldn’t read fluently until about fourth grade. I could have been one of the examples cited by Flesch in Why Johnny Can’t Read. My somewhat younger brother was taught from first grade on by a method strongly focused on phonics, and he could read fluently by second grade. My youngest brother taught himself to read, with no explicit instruction, and could read well by the age of four.

So, what do you think? This substack is, in part, a forum for discussion, and your stories, comments, questions, agreements, and disagreements are valued and treated with respect by me and other readers. They add the value of these letters.

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With respect and best wishes,

Peter

References

Lynn A. Olson, James R. Evans, & Wade T. Keckler (2006). Precocious readers: Past, present, and future. Journal for the Education of the Gifted, 30, 205-235.

Valerie Gail Margrain (2005). Precocious readers: Case studies of spontaneous learning, self-regulation and social support in the early years. Doctoral Dissertation, Victoria University of Wellington, School of Education. New Zealand.

James S. Kim (2008). Research and the Reading Wars. In: Hess FM (Ed.), When research matters: How scholarship influences education policy, 89-111. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

*Note: This letter is a replay, slightly altered, of an essay I originally published as a Psychology Today blog post nearly 12 years ago. The story regarding reading has not changed in any significant way in the interim.