Neglecting Literacy

I have read several articles lately that focus on the declining literacy rate and the problem that colleges have with high-schoolers who arrive on the college campus either unable to read, or with severely limited reading ability. I lay this problem solidly at the feet of the government educational system. Here’s why.

Let’s start with the basic problem: passing kids who aren’t ready for advanced work. “Social promotion” and keeping kids vaguely within their age grouping are very, very detrimental to a child’s ability to achieve literacy. While promoting a child along with his friends is, emotionally, a nice thing to do, as it saves the child from the embarrassment of “failing a grade” and being the butt of jokes, the fact is that, logically, social promotion puts a child in a position to fail yet again. When a child is promoted even though it is clear that he is unready for the advanced work, even when it is obvious and demonstrated that the child is lacking the basic skills needed to perform at the higher level, he is being set up for failure.

For example: I took an advanced level Algebra I class in the eighth grade. I had trouble with the work from the beginning, and became frustrated by my continual failure to do well in the class. My teacher was unsympathetic and unwilling to spend the time needed to help me through the trouble; he also did not take the time to make the logical suggestion that I drop to a regular level class. I fell further and further behind, and became more and more frustrated, until I finally reached the point of giving up. I failed Algebra that year. The following year, I took Algebra I from a different teacher in a regular-paced class. This teacher sensed that I was capable of doing the work but was missing important mathematical foundation-knowledge. She took the time to help me strengthen the foundation, and I excelled. I was not her star pupil, but I did pass the class.

When you promote a first grader who cannot read at a first-grade level, you are asking him to build a castle on a foundation with half of its stones missing. He will end up even further behind—and may become unwilling to try—as the broken foundation cracks under the added weight of stones of knowledge that it is not able to support—leading the child to embarrassment, frustration, and discouragement. If you fail, people make fun of you; you are frustrated by continual failure and ridicule and become discouraged, unable to move forward.

If you’re in third grade and cannot read, what are you doing in the third grade? When I was in school (in the Dark Ages), we could not pass from kindergarten to first grade without basic reading ability. If we were not reading proficiently by the end of first grade, we were held back from second grade until our reading skills were up to par. A child who cannot read fairly fluently by the third grade is going to be seriously hampered in his/her ability to perform in school, as teachers of all subjects in higher grades rely more and more on worksheets and texts with written explanations and directions. This is a situation in which home-schooling is of great benefit to the student.

The home-schooled child has the benefit of a teacher who knows that he is struggling to read and who can adjust his curriculum accordingly. The home-school teacher can take the child back to the beginning and can begin to rebuild the foundation, incorporating the stones that were missed in the first attempt to learn to read. Children who have reading difficulties but are found to have an extensive speaking vocabulary often have not grasped the letter-to-sound symbolism of the alphabet. A solid phonics course can solve this problem. Children who “don’t like to read” have a tendency to avoid practising their reading, which leads to lack of reading speed, impaired comprehension, and short reading attention spans. These children benefit by being read to in an interactive manner, with the parent pointing out words that the child knows well and asking the child to read those words as the parent reads the surrounding text. There are many other strategies that the parent can use to strengthen reading abililty and address reading problems.

However, what the parent (or home-school teacher) can do that the classroom teacher cannot is to tailor all of the child’s curriculum around his reading needs. The child is not left behind in science or social studies because he is unable to read the text. He is not left behind in math because he cannot read the word problems. The parent can ease the child through his difficulties while still increasing his strengths in other areas. Or the parent can choose to “drop everything” and focus solely on reading until the child is at the appropriate level. This is a luxury that the classroom teacher does not have.

Thus, homeschooling has a definite advantage over mainstream schooling for the child with “learning disabilties” or reading problems. The child will not be “held back” in his other work, nor will he find himself the butt of ridicule because he is unable to do the work required of him. His self-esteem will not be unnecessarily damaged and he will not learn the very wrong but very common lesson that failure is bad and rejection and ridicule will follow it. Rather, he will learn to work through his failure until he achieves success and, in doing so, will gain the self-esteem that comes from conquering failure and achieving a difficult goal.

Tags: Education, home education, home schooling