We've been experiencing some "technical difficulties" in our life post-international-move here at two chords. It's a long, convoluted story and perhaps I will write about it some time, when it feels less emotionally fraught (and the underlying issues hopefully resolved). I've got some material queued up for the next four weeks, starting tomorrow. In the meantime, here's an education-related loose set of musings in response to today’s post by Erik Hoel.
Mr. Hoel is a neuroscientist-cum-culture writer, who has taught his toddler to read. I don't know if he's taught other toddlers to read, but he seems very convinced that his methodology will work for, if not all toddlers, more than just his N=1.
I'm all for sharing what works for you in the hopes that it may work for others, too, but it's the motivation behind it, that is of particular curiosity:
My “crackpot” opinion is that our society deprives children of independence, intellectual development, and personal joy, all by refusing to teach them to read until quite late.
He's self-deprecating, at least. It's interesting to me, because having in the past lived in Germany for 8 years and the Czech Republic for 9 years, I know that the conventional wisdom there is precisely the opposite. They think this opinion is crackpot because they feel that our American society deprives children of independence, intellectual development, and personal joy, because we are WAAAAAY too obsessed with getting our kids to read before first grade. Kids should be playing and having a good time, and through that, learning the social-emotional skills they will need for first grade and beyond.
To be fair, German and the Slavic languages (very much so) are far more phonetically consistent in their morphology than English is. Even loanwords in Czech are always and easily spelled according to Czech morphology, e.g., meeting becomes mítink in Czech (final consonants are often unvoiced, hence the k). These people can afford to wait until the kids develop the logical-analytical skills to start drawing their attention to the sound-symbol pairing. Children's books in Czech are meant to be read aloud by adults to children. There's no difference in complexity of vocabulary and grammar between a children's book and an adult book; only the thematic material is different. There's no equivalent of "Hop on Pop" or "The Cat in the Hat" in Czech.
This lack of Dr. Suess-like books was a big disappointment for me as an adult language learner, hoping to find some manageable texts in the library that I could read sans dictionary, and just get some repetition of vocabulary in a variety of contexts. Many adults learning languages in Europe are hoping to pass language exams for employment and residency and are driven to use brute rote learning to achieve their aims. Sure, I absolutely could have done that, too, but it felt like such a drag, and it doesn't stick as well as simply reading a wide variety of materials at a particular reading level. The language-learning market definitely caters to people other than me and my proclivities.
I have three siblings; I was the youngest for the first twelve years of my life. My older brother (child #2 in the line-up) and I taught ourselves to read and write some time in our respective third years; my sister (child #1) and my younger brother (child #4, aka the only-child with two sisters and a brother) learned to read sometime around age 6. My parents did the same for all of us — they read to us almost daily. There was no explicit instruction; we just gathered on the couch while my mom read things like "A Christmas Carol" or selections from the Louis Untermeyer compilation The Golden Treasury of Children's Literature. I recognize that this is essentially the Central European Method of Teaching Your Children to Read. Read complex language, out loud, in a warm, loving environment. Maybe have your finger travel on the page under the words as you read them.
Why did two of us figure out how to read on our own so early and the other two a bit later? I mean, if they learned sometime during first grade, I'm guessing they really had a minimum of explicit instruction before things started to click. Most of the prep work had happened already at home, via modeling, rather than explicit instruction. I don't think the later learning of my siblings negatively affected their childhood, nor their adulthood. In fact, there are many ways in which the oldest and youngest of we four are far more successful adults than we intellectually precocious (socially-emotionally a bit less so) middle two.
My kid also taught himself to read, sometime during age four. When he was 18 months, he recognized that the graphic representation of letters and numbers was a thing, an entity. He called them As. We'd go to Little Gym and if some other toddler had writing on their shirt, he'd go up them, poke them hard in the chest where the writing was (much to their dismay, natch), smile and exclaim, "As!" Shortly after age two, he was reading license plates — listing their contents, so to speak (he had also figured out on his own to say them from left to right). Living in a city with a robust public transit system helps. He would read out the tram and bus numbers; my friend's slightly younger son in NYC was reading the letters on the subway lines.
It's cool that Mr. Hoel was able to figure out that not only was his kid ready to learn to read, but that it brought the kid joy. And he should absolutely share his methodology. That said, I know now that even though my kid might have been intellectually ready to read earlier than he did, it would have been a terrible idea to push it. Around the time he figured out reading on his own, he was diagnosed with Pathological Demand Avoidance, a lesser-known proposed corner of ASD.1 Pushing him to read probably would have made him reject reading, because it would have stopped feeling safe to him, per the nature of his disability. It was better to let the ability develop in its own time. Even after he learned to read, he still found great comfort in being read to for several years.
Mr. Hoel points out that 1:1 tutoring is the most efficient form of education. But we don't do that because we've all been sucked into the capitalist vortex by those who are rich-enough-to-not-have-to-work-but-work-anyway-to-continue-hoarding-wealth who can afford to hire such 1:1 tutoring for every subject. The rest of us need to work. We need to have someone else to prepare our children to work in the capitalist vortex, which is only possible via the insurance-like structures of welfare government, pooling our financial resources together. The only 1:1 tutoring we might be able to afford are weekly music lessons for our kid(s). Maybe.
In the meantime, the pooling of our financial resources together to purchase education for our future workers children is inefficient precisely because the process of education is structured less like human learning and curiosity and more like factory assembly. One size fits all. Except it doesn't. Not every toddler will learn to read via Mr. Hoel's method, even with 1:1 tutoring, because every toddler is a different mix of aptitudes and abilities. Some will simply not be ready.
Most people with some sort of explicit instruction (preferably based in science) do learn to read if they haven't figured it out on their own — which is common, because unlike language, reading is not innate. We've become better at teaching reading because we've recognized that one size does not fit all, because we've recognized that some people have cognitive barriers to learning to read even when intellectually ready and need supports.
It's when we do not recognize that different people have different internal timelines to understanding all there is to know that we run into problems. If we combined that recognition with 1:1 tutoring for every kid — wow. Every kid getting what they need, when they're ready for it. One can dream.
Reading is a complex activity. Will you know at age two or three that your child isn't taking to reading because, say, they're dyslexic, or because they're simply not ready in the way that they will be later? I suspect what deprives toddlers of independence is not giving them chances to be independent, what deprives toddlers of intellectual development and joy is not providing them with opportunities to interact with a variety of people of different ages in a wide variety of activities including but absolutely not limited to reading aloud.2 What brings one kid joy will not necessarily bring another kid joy. It may behoove those of us with children in our lives to spend our energies figuring out as precisely as we can what makes our kids feel independent, intellectually stimulated, and joyful. But when it's not what you think, let it be what it is.
It's not in the DSM — yet — so it's not universally recognized. A wise woman recently said to me, "Everything that's presently in the DSM was at one point not in the DSM." Change is slow, but perhaps forthcoming.
For some more on this from a seasoned pre-school teacher, I recommend Teacher Tom's fine blog.
I think much of this is fair, and appreciate you writing such a thorough perspective on it. I do talk in the other parts of the series about making sure that this is actually right for your child, but so much in this one, since it's Part 3. I'll explicitly agree: it's definitely not right for all children! Full stop. My only opinion is that I do think it's more right for more children than people think.
I'll specifically address one part about the "German" view, because it's a more general criticism that people often say in this context, which is that in childhood it's important to focus on play, imaginative games, and social relationships, instead of reading. I strongly agree with this. If I had the choice between, say, encouraging imaginative play, and then on the other hand teaching a child to read, and I could only do one, I would choose encouraging imaginative play. But this observation is easy to slip into an either-or fallacy that's not true for many circumstances, because I find these activities are not usually restrictions of each other. E.g., the 15-30 minutes of reading in the morning over breakfast leaves plenty of time for imaginative play, and for social outings, and for the development of emotional intelligence. I think it all compounds, rather than competes: at a certain point, kids need fuel for their play, need context for social situations, etc. That often comes in the form of stories.
But again, you're right it's not for everyone and depends on many outside factors - it's just a method I do think will generalize well (especially because there's lots of flexibility) for the parents who themselves make the judgement that it's appropriate.