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Never Too Late To Learn to Read
By Jan Fortune-Wood
I was
recently involved with a home educating family that was being pressured
by the authorities because their two children, both under ten and both
severely dyslexic, could not yet read. The truth is that there is no
magic reading age. The truth is that here in the UK almost a third of
children leave school after eleven years of state education and
thousands of hours of structured literacy instruction, functionally
illiterate. Yet the fact remains that literacy is an area where home
educators, especially unschoolers and those nurturing their children’s
autonomy and intrinsic motivation, can be made to feel extremely
vulnerable and under pressure to conform.
Examining some of the responses to
a large research project in the UK into home education, we came across a
rather sad paragraph from one mother who said that she wanted to allow
her child to develop at her own pace and learn things when she was
intrinsically motivated to do so. But when she still wasn’t reading by
the age of eight, the mother felt she was forced to admit defeat and
realized that she would have to make her child read. The mother wanted
to be one of those people who could claim that she had “painlessly and
effortlessly” imparted reading, but said that she had to face reality
and teach her child to read “before it was too late.”
There are two problems with
this. Firstly, it makes the assumption that there is an age beyond which
things will be “too late,” so forcing us to take pre-emptive action even
if it’s not what the child wants. Secondly, it makes the assumption that
if reading doesn’t happen by “magic” then we should panic and resort to
coercion.
Different children learn to read
at different ages and different individuals need different kinds of
support and input. Some children do seem to learn to read by osmosis –
they pick up the clues and take off without a formal lesson ever taking
place, both at older and younger ages. Other children want and enjoy a
more structured approach to literacy, but only when they chose and
control it. The “painless and effortless” approach to literacy is
wonderful for those for whom it works, and I’ve seen some great
examples. But what matters most is responding to the individual.
For all kinds of cultural and
historical reasons, reading has been the barometer of how we judge our
children as successful learners and ourselves as adequate educators,
which inevitably means that our feelings about the activity are complex
and perhaps likely to cause anxiety.
One of the factors in this is
the judgement of others – as alternative educators we live with the
constant tension of knowing that we are under scrutiny and that
mainstream theorists are just waiting to be able to point to our
failures. This is a good argument for maintaining our children’s
privacy, not in the sense of hiding away, but simply to put some
distance between our children’s intrinsic learning and intrusive
questions. Such questioners fail to understand that learning isn’t a
matter of ticking off the right boxes at the prescribed ages; it soon
gets old explaining to the umpteenth person something you know they are
not going to believe anyway.
As parents, many of us take
great pleasure in reading and when our children aren’t early readers we
can worry that they are missing out on these magical imaginary worlds.
Pleasure is an excellent motive for learning to read, but only when it
is the child’s motive; we won’t enhance their pleasure by forcing the
issue, far from it.) It’s also worth noting that in fact reading for
pleasure is a falling statistic among children educated in schools.) The
whole Harry Potter phenomenon revolves, in great part, around how
amazing it is to find any book that children in numbers actually want to
read.
This is a terrible indictment of
mainstream education. There is no automatic or linear link between the
skill of reading and the pleasure of reading and there is no
corresponding need to fear that late reading might mean the pleasure
won’t happen. Once the skill is an intrinsic desire rather than an
externally imposed chore to be endured, then the pleasure will follow.
In the meantime, there is a great deal of pleasure to be had from books
that children can’t read themselves; being read to is a very pleasant
experience both in terms of the story and the relationship with the
reader.
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The key to reading is making the
association with an area of interest. At various stages, and for their
own reasons, most children reach a stage where their pre-literate
interests and pursuits become less compelling or all-consuming and the
child is searching for new outlets. This can also work in the other
direction, when reading and interests become inextricably linked. A
child might have a new interest in fantasy-figure game playing or
computer games, but find that his literacy doesn’t match his interests.
With this new motivation, the resulting transformation in literacy can
be very rapid. Sometimes it is reading in itself that becomes the new
area of interest, perhaps with a child having an internal awareness,
even if it is not fully articulated, that literacy will open up new
areas of interest for her.
The obsession with literacy at
set ages and stages is bolstered within conventional educational
thinking by a network of pervasive myths about what are considered to be
the essentials of learning, including the acquisition of what are
commonly called “basic skills.” This belief that there is a homogenous
body of knowledge which everyone needs to know also gives rise to a
rigid stereotyping of what is deemed to be “age appropriate” learning
and a widespread misconception that proper education is something that
can be called “balanced.”
Autonomous educators do not buy
into these misconceptions; essentials, age stereotyped learning, and
balance are all concepts which pose a serious threat to children’s
intrinsic motivation and their own innate curiosity and drive to learn.
In British schools, under the
current literacy strategy, children in the first seven years of primary
education spend at least 1,960 hours learning to read, whereas John
Taylor Gatto has estimated that the combined key skills of literacy and
numeracy can easily be achieved by a motivated and interested child in
up to 100 hours. The anecdotal evidence of many home educators who
follow an autonomous approach confirms that such a basic skill as
literacy can be picked up even more quickly than this when the
motivation to read is fully intrinsic. In short, children in school are
wasting a minimum of 1,910 of those literacy hours.
Yet this horrendous waste of
hours is of less concern than the damage this formal instruction does to
children’s thinking processes and their ability to motivate and control
their own learning. Children are losing opportunities for their own
intrinsic learning and play. They might easily grow up never to take
pleasure in a book again. Ironically, in an increasingly technical
society, the age at which reading is necessary for participation in many
of society’s activities is rising.
Children can use computers, play
video games and access visually presented information, as well as enjoy
all the traditional pleasures of childhood learning through play and
art, long before they need to decode symbolic language. Home educating
parents whose children learn by an autonomous route know that their
children will acquire the skills they need to take advantage of their
environment and pursue their own aspirations. We also know that however
the “essentials” are defined, they will be acquired without resort to
lesson plans, set hours or externally imposed motivation.
Autonomously educating parents
are culturally peculiar in respecting our children’s intrinsic learning
capability and in trusting that children will use this capability at the
right time and in the right spheres for their best educational growth.
We are also acutely aware that not to respect our children in such ways
can have devastating consequences for the learning process. Autonomous
education does not set out not to transmit a body of essentials which
can be systematically worked through and ticked off the curriculum list.
Instead, autonomous education sets out to support children in achieving
what they wish to achieve and negotiating their own creative and
individual place in the world according to their own intrinsic
motivation.
To parent in this way takes a great deal of
courage in the current educational climate. It takes a great measure of
trust in our children specifically, in humanity’s intrinsic motivation
to learn generally, and in our role as fully engaged parents and
educators. The courage and the trust comes from living in an environment
of life long learning and consent and from networking to get support for
such a lifestyle. We may be in the minority, but I personally know that
reading, and any of the other so called essentials, are acquired by
children in a variety of ways and over a broad age spectrum without any
of the stress of coercion and without any overall loss to the learning
process or the love of books. Intrinsic motivation is never too late.
Jan Fortune-Wood lives and
works in Wales, UK as a freelance writer, poet, publisher, parenting
adviser, and humanist liturgist (developing ceremonies and rites of
passage). She has written many articles for Life Learning Magazine, and
is author of four books on home education, autonomous education, and
non-coercive parenting: (Doing It Their Way;
Without Boundaries; Bound To Be Free; and With Consent, all
published by Educational Heretics Press). She unschooled her own four
children.
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