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

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