[ Essay by Bob Rose, rovareose@aol.com, Nov. 2007]



LITERACY IN KINDERGARTEN



The Reading Wars began in earnest in 1967, when Harvard’s Jeanne Chall published her famous book, Beginning to Read – The Great Debate. At the time it was fashionable to teach reading in a “child-centered” way, based on the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Dewey, believing all education should proceed naturally, without burdening students with adult-generated admonitions or rules. It had become to be widely believed that teaching children letter-sound correspondences, the alphabetic principle and the basic rules of grammar would actually be counterproductive to learning.



However, after several years spent observing young children learn in classrooms, Chall found the philosophies of literacy instruction fell into two broad categories. The first she called “meaning emphasis” because the voguish emphasis was indeed on the child’s use of language and the quest to find meaning in the written word. The other she called “code emphasis” because practitioners believed children had to understand the basic nature of alphabetic writing in order to subsequently learn to read with good comprehension.



Chall’s studied conclusion was that, generally speaking, “code emphasis” was a much better way to start literacy instruction in young children, particularly poor and socially disadvantaged children.



According to education historian Diane Ravitch’s generally excellent book, Left Back – A Century of Failed School Reforms (2000), Chall’s book by no means ended The Great Debate. To the contrary, there was a “progressive” reaction to the book’s message, and many educators stuck to their habitual beliefs, again emphasizing “child-centered”, “natural”, and “socially and individually appropriate” methods for the teaching of literacy.



According to Ravitch, a decade later, by 1977, the public outcry had again led to a “back to basics” movement that again pushed the teaching of phonics to the fore. And again there was a reaction from the entrenched educational establishment. During the 1980’s a movement called “whole language” became all the rage among a large percentage of teachers and education professors. The essence of whole language was the belief that formal theories of the teaching of literacy are counter-productive and unwarranted. Like Rousseau in his classic on politics and education, Emile, or on Education, reading occurred “naturally” when students, subtly guided but never coerced or pushed by elders, came to want to learn literacy on their own. Rousseau emphatically didn’t care whether children had learned to read and write well into adolescence. Rousseau, in a declared attempt to modernize Plato’s prescription for “a philosopher king”, believed that man’s only natural instinct was one of love for one’s fellow man, and of an altruistic desire to serve humanity. Any variation in human nature, he felt, was due to the malign influence of tradition and civilization. He was the first author in history to decry “bourgeois” values. He had previously blamed society’s ills on the invention of private property, and he advised the abandonment of cities and made other recommendations repeated in The Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels.



By the end of the decade public and congressional demands for a more rigorous approach to the education of the nation’s youth led to a committee which reported on the ideal way to teach phonics in schools. The lead writer, Marilyn Jager Adams, wrote the report which was published in book form for the public under the title, Beginning to Read -- Thinking and Learning About Print. In this book the author insisted children must understand “the alphabetic code”, but also that teaching phonics was only an adjunct to the most important learning to recognize and identify words instantly and correctly by sight. Although “sight-word reading” was close to the heart of “progressive” educators, Adams’ insistence on prior understanding of letter-sound correspondences made her a villain in the mind of “progressive” educators who, according to Ravitch, believed their approach was essential to the social redemption of the country, and who considered a more didactic approach to be dangerously “right-wing”.



The 1990’s were marked by a “return to basics”, and saw the introduction of “Goals 2000” under the Clinton administration, and subsequently the “No Child Left Behind” and the “Put Reading First” programs of the administration of the younger President Bush.



Ravitch seemed to believe the issue was resolved, and that improvement in the nation’s disastrous reading practices would be resolved as soon as a “blended” approach, incorporating both the traditional initial emphasis on phonics, followed rapidly by immersion in the “good literature” so dear to the hearts of “progressives”, was effected.



Ravitch was correct in stating that either approach, carried to an extreme, would be counter-productive, but she was incorrect in believing a dramatic amelioration of the situation was at hand. As she wrote, the National Assessment of Education Progress reports indicated that 27% of European-American fourth-graders, 60% of Latino students, and 64% of African-American students in our schools read “below basic”. Which is to say, they are functionally illiterate at an age where the fluent ability to read is imperative for continued meaningful education, especially in the “knowledge era” ushered in by high technology a half century ago.



I believe both “phonics” and “whole language” are equally poor ways to instill literacy, and no combination of the two can be expected to solve this immense national problem.



I am a retired physician, and I have spent the past decade attempting to apply the thinking of medical science to the problem of teaching literacy.



An important element of “progressive” educational thought is that intelligence, and therefore the ability to succeed academically, is innate, genetically acquired, and unalterable. This view was again pushed hard in the book “The Bell Curve, by Murray and Herrnstein, published in 1994. These authors believed they had proof that African-American and those with American Indian backgrounds have lower average intelligences than white Americans, and that many children are simply not educable in the traditional sense of the term.



The impetus of progressive education during the twentieth century was provided in large part by John Dewey’s book (1899) The School and Society. In it, Dewey prescribed a very Rousseau-like form of education in the belief a traditional education was not useful to the 99% of children unequipped for meaningful academic study who would spend their lives working in factories in the then-new era of the machine age. He felt a new anti-capitalist utopia would emerge if the schools could only teach children to adjust themselves to new social realities without developing the greed, acquisitiveness and hyper-individualism engendered by the capitalistic system of competition and disharmony. Dewey visited the Soviet Union, as did many of his colleagues, and he held a mock trial in which Leon Trotsky, having been purged by Stalin, was found innocent of any wrongdoing. Dewey, among other educational philosophers of his day, believed that consciousness was a group phenomenon and was beyond the grasp on individuals to acquire. In more recent decades the idea has transmuted into a belief in “constructivism”. This idea, akin to “post-modernism” and existentialism, incorporates the belief that individuals “construct their own truths” and that this is both inevitable and desirable from a social standpoint, and that didactic efforts at instilling one’s beliefs in children is the height of misadventure.



Unfortunately neither this belief nor the teaching of “phonics” has anything to do with teaching young school students to read. Just as it was not understood until the late 1980’s that children with reading problems typically lack the ability to break a spoken word into its component letter-sounds, I discovered young children are incapable of making a mental image of written syllables or other written entities.



Having spent the past decade studying, reading, and communicating by email with a wide variety of educators and teachers on the subject, I have come to several minoritarian conclusions about the literacy problem. I now believe that “dyslexia” and “specific learning disorders” do not exist as biological entities, but are only manifestations of the mistaken ideas and faulty theories of the “experts” in the field. It is common knowledge that there is no way to diagnose these entities except to observe that many children fail to learn as expected; there is no way to prognosticate as to which students will suddenly “catch on” and subsequently learn normally; and no way to treat these putative disorders except by the tried and true teaching techniques used for millennia.



The central problem of “dyslexics” is not their inability to “hear the sounds in words”, the current dogma, any more than it was that they “see letters backwards”, the previous mistake, now shown to be absolutely untrue.



A normal reader can identify a word (and even note any spelling errors) in a word clearly seen for only a small fraction of a second. Literate Chinese can do the same with a series of three to seven sequential Chinese characters.



"Dyslexics" cannot envision or remember what words look like. Anyone doubting this need only ask a one to draw an accurate picture of any written work he cannot “sound out” correctly.



As a matter of fact, preliterate children and other illiterates are incapable of mentally envisioning written syllables. This ability is not innate and must be learned. The past century’s most influential psychologist, inventor of “behavior therapy”, B. F. Skinner was an avowed “anti-mentalist” (as well as a socialist devotee of Mao Tse-Tung) refused to see any benefit in the philosophic concept of “mind”, and that's why we now say “cognitive” which only means “mental", and “cognitive deficit” translates into “mental defect” in plain English.



As with learning anything, the key to learning to mentally envision letters and sequences of them is to think about them. If we asked four- and five-year-old children to think about what alphabet letters look like for five minutes daily, they would soon spontaneously become competent readers, as long as they complied with our request.



The problem is, of course, that young children would not comply. However, it is impossible to write an alphabet letter without thinking about its shape, and planning the trajectory of the pencil tip, before hand. Therein lies the explanation of the value of printing fluency . Children can learn to read without knowing how letters are written, but all lagging readers in K-1 are less than fluent in printing the alphabet. The remedy is simply better instruction and more practice.



To test this theory, I enrolled on an internet listserv of Teachers Applying Whole Language, and asked them to measure their first-grade students fluency in writing the alphabet (we had them write for twenty seconds, one third of a minute, counted the number of legible different letters, and multiplied by three to get a “letters per minute” or “lpm” rate, because young children often can not give maximal attention to similar tasks for a full minute). I also asked these teachers to assess and report each child’s relative reading skill. Children were identified by numbers only, so permission for participating in a scientific test was unnecessary.

After collecting data on 94 such “control” students, the very strong positive correlation with printing fluency and reading skill was established. However the teachers felt the study “proved nothing” and they refused to attempt to get children to print fluently on purpose. This would have been contrary to whole language dogma, and to me this seemed a purely political refusal.

Next, wanting to reproduce the study, I started my own listserv (archives are available to anyone who signs onto the k1writing list at yahoogroups.com) and found five kindergarten teachers who were anxious to help me prove that adequate printing practice with alphabet letters is an invaluable adjunct to making young readers (as long as “dyslexia” has not yet been diagnosed and provided a self-fulfilling prophecy), just as Maria Montessori wrote it would in her book, The Montessori Method, in 1912. The findings of these teachers with 106 kindergarten students were astounding. There were virtually no reading failures, and race, ethnicity and social status had nothing to do with it. The only failures were students who lacked the self-discipline to comply with the teachers request they spend five minutes daily practicing writing the alphabet. Contrary to progressive predictions, no negative effects of the practice were observed, and children generally loved seeing themselves master the art of “fluent” printing. Children learned to read by the time of, or immediately after acquiring the ability to write the alphabet at a rate of 40 lpm, and such children could also name randomly presented alphabet letters at the same rate (which is well known to be an excellent predictor of reading success in rising first-graders).

I wrote up our findings and sent them to the Harvard Educational Review in March, 1994. Two months later I received a form letter telling me my manuscript had been rejected for publication. Since then I have attempted to get many many teachers, school principals, university education professors, and school superintendents to try to duplicate our findings. None have done so, and as noted by the members of the National Reading Panel in the year 2000, there is still no published study on the possible beneficial effect. Both the past and the present acting chiefs of the NIH’s National Institute of Child Health and Human Development emailed me their agreement that no such study exists, but neither proceeded to see that such a study was done.

Once children can mentally envision written syllables like “cat”, “boy” or “Tom”, they naturally and immediately begin to ask how many common words are written. They say the sound that each letters makes as they write it (we all do this; there is no other way to write, in any written language). The “phonic” values of vowels in English are almost totally unreliable, especially in the words constituting the vocabularies of kindergartners. Rather than “learning phonics”, children learn how our words are phonetically written.

As they learn how words are written, and to write them, children simultaneously learn phonetics, spelling, writing, and “phonemic awareness”…the ability to “segment” spoken words into their component letter sounds, a skill generally possessed only by those literate in alphabetic languages.

Virgil Hillyer, the headmaster of the Calvert School in Baltimore, 1899-1931, wrote in the early 1920's that the school had never failed to teach a normal first-grader to read and write, even though phonics was not taught. Children began on the first day to write “The tree is green”, and “I see a tree”, etc., etc., until they were fully literate and ready to begin academic study after about the first three months of school. (There was no kindergarten at the Calvert School at the time.

Most proponents of a “new” way of teaching literacy claim their method is “scientific”. I do not claim this, though our initial study was certainly consistent with the scientific method. In order to be scientifically proven, someone else will have to study the complicated art of teaching kindergartners to read and try to reproduce our study. I can only guarantee the attempt will do no harm, and getting children to be better at writing can’t be a bad thing in itself.

That is why I am writing this essay. I have also read that children who can give correct answers to simple single-digit addition facts at a rate exceeding forty correct answers per minute in the second-grade will never have subsequent problems with math or science. This, as well as the literacy method I described, worked for my grand children, and I personally believe it will work for any grossly normal human child.

And current fluency recommendations are too modest. My grand daughter could read at the rate of 120 correct words per minute at the end of first-grade.

If she could do it, any child can.