Kids Today Can't Read?
People out there are asking good questions. Here’s one from today – The “Kids Today Can’t Read” Problem: Reading Crisis or “Perennial Gripe”? by Paul Thomas
His answer impressed me. I won’t attempt to describe his entire article; it deserves being read in its entirety. I’ll just summarize and mention my takeaways.
So, is it true kids today can’t read? He first suggests there has simply never been any catastrophic social consequence supporting that idea. Then he asks if kids today can’t read, was there ever an identifiable period in US history when US public education taught reading well and “kids today” did in fact read well enough. As a scholar of literacy and the history of education, he can’t find that time period. He therefore discards the hypothesis.
He argues that he finds little to no evidence that there is a reading crisis and concludes
“the best explanation for the “perennial gripe” that “kids today can’t read” is that the claim itself has almost nothing to do with “kids today” but with the persistent way that “adults today” always misread “kids today” through some sort of misguided nostalgia for their own childhood and education as well as an entrenched urge to criticize younger generations.”
He readily admits that there are kids who fall through the cracks in our system and points out that in most cases poverty and social inequity are to blame – not changing standards, tests, programs or teacher training. And he believes as a country we need to address those issues. In this I am in complete agreement.
My own experience watching children learn to read has shown me, vividly and repeatedly, the myriad ways in which children learn. When schools assume that there is one way to “teach” reading and one way to assess what was learned, I believe they overlook the very real differences in how children come to reading.
Allowing experienced teachers to respond to the children actually in their classrooms seems a much sounder approach. When we impose one or two methods of teaching reading on all students and then use standardized tests to measure the results, we are not necessarily measuring what “kids today” can or cannot do. We are measuring how well they respond to the particular methods we have chosen and the particular assessment they were given – and no single method is likely to work equally well for every child.
My study traces countless journeys children took to learn to read. As is true in the population at large, many children in my study learned to read early and on their own. Some children learned to read in a literacy rich home with no direction instruction. Some learned from highly structured lessons. One mother explained how she introduced reading lessons at a very young age, but if a child struggled there was no problem putting it off for months or even years and coming back when the child was ready. The variety of materials used to help children learn to read was huge. Parents were able to let learning to read be a more natural part of a child’s life, rather than sticking to the timing required of a highly structured reading curriculum in traditional schooling. And looking at the outcomes for the children in my study there was no “reading crisis”.
Comments