How bad are childhood literacy rates?
vox.com
vox.com
Teaching high school on zoom is one thing, now imagine teaching 3rd. So the veteran elementary teachers retired or quit, and there’s no adequate pipeline to replace them, especially in underserved communities.
Coming through the system now is a cohort of children whose k-5 teachers have been a rotating cast of subs and ineffective new hires, and it shows.
It could be different. It must be. We have role models to imitate, better methods to follow, resources and tools galore. What is needed now is organization toward common purpose. How does the internet bystander locate effective organizations to disrupt the march of folly? This is a situation where the pilot has gone mad and we must seize control of the aircraft but are too paralyzed by social forces to act.
I think we are very far from such a personal connection to an AI. If that connection isn't there, there's no real stake.
Not me. Knowledge and patience do it for me. Computers do pretty well on the patience front, but are a bit more "DIY" than I'd like on the knowledge front. I'm hoping AI can fix that. But I have met humans who did well on both, and boy did I advance in skill studying under them. They are far superior to anything I think AI could ever become. But they are few and far between, at any level of education (even at uni, they're exceptional).
Most teachers I was far smarter than the teacher and they were a waste of time. Plus I've been burned extremely hard by teachers I felt a personal human connection with (and then social workers) "trying to help". Never again. Hell, I literally fought my way out that situation, physically, many individual fights with actual people getting hurt, and not by choice (did you know, for their own ease and budget savings, social workers put kids who get bullied into the same group bedroom as kids who pulled a knife at school (and don't make sure they don't have a knife). That's how much they ACTUALLY care). Never again.
I also would like to point out the priority. A patient teacher with knowledge and zero human connection: anyone who wants to learns A LOT. People who really don't want to learn, learn a little. A teacher with knowledge but no patience: everyone learns a lot, but there's a lot of shouting. It becomes painfully clear who is best. A teacher with lots of human connection without knowledge: everyone learns very little. A teacher with lots of human connection and no knowledge or patience: worst of all possible worlds. Bullies run the classroom. Nobody learns anything.
This last kind of teachers, lots of human connection (at least in their mind) and very little knowledge, rules the schools of our country.
In other words, you want to do well for students: for teachers, knowledge comes first, by 100 miles. Human connection is somewhere between nice to have and destructive. Patience: same. Makes things look nicer from the outside, but is actually kind of destructive.
Why can't things such as Khan Academy be included in the school curriculum, allowing children the chance to work at their own pace? The best school system I ever attended did this (through 8th grade, children were allowed to work up to 4 grades ahead --- after that there was no cap, many teachers were accredited as faculty at a local college (or students would be taken to the college, or professors from there brought to the school) --- it was not uncommon for a student to graduate from high school and simultaneously be awarded a college degree.
My kids had access to texts/resources which I only dreamed of when I was young (too much time reading Hermann Hesse's _The Glass Bead Game_ which they seem drawn from):
- https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.htm...
- https://www.motionmountain.net/
- https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-elements-by-theodore-gray/...
I also think that anecdotal evidence is evidence nonetheless. If teachers active for many years start to ring the bells they are probably onto something, even if the official statistics are yet to come.
The author of the article starts by acknowledging a historical bias that generations have apparently always had against each other. They then explore, keeping an eye on their own potential biases, the evidence that literacy genuinely appears to be lower in younger generations. I don't know what more you could possibly ask from them.
According to the argument, watering down standards to increase retention (and revenue) gained legitimacy in the sixties as the higher education act empowered administrators to increase the size of their ranks and policy views at colleges across the country. These colleges trained education majors according to their new philosophy, who became a new rank of principals and superintendents in the eighties and onwards, promulgating the transactional and nihilistic view of the purpose of teaching.
On the one hand, it sounds farfetched. On the other hand, all five of the teachers and professors over 50 whom I've raised the topic to over the years agreed wholeheartedly.
It is a wonder we learned anything at all and it made English tests a hellish experience, since it was never clear what was actually correct. This was on top of English itself being a confusing language (see all of the words ending in ough if you need an example). English teachers seemed to assume we had some magical ability to know the right answer after confusing us with conflicting examples, and we rarely did. It is no wonder back then that they said the same things about us.
If they want to improve literacy, they should replace the required reading with books that have no flaws in the spelling and grammar to reinforce English lessons. Then we might see student literacy rise as students stop being so confused.
Books like Huck Finn are critical to building the model in your head that every writer has a different perspective, that they will present differently, and even perceive differently. (Is Huck exaggerating to you the reader? This is a critical intuition to get about all writing to make you more literate, not less.) You learn to understand through different writing styles, which is another absolutely critical step in becoming literate.
Just thinking about a world where we take your advice above makes my stomach turn it seems so wrong to what the point of reading these books even is…
I was serious. I cited Huckleberry Finn because it was the most egregious of the books that were forced on us, but it was by no means the only one. Many examples of incorrect grammar were normalized by books and I hated being forced to read them because I could see how it was confusing me.
> Books like Huck Finn are critical to building the model in your head that every writer has a different perspective, that they will present differently, and even perceive differently.
I did not learn this. I am in my 30s and I had no idea that this was the point until reading your comment. In hindsight, what I learned from books like this is that nothing made sense since I would be told one thing is correct and then be forced to read things that normalized the opposite and by the time I finished reading, I had forgotten the correct way. Expecting a child that knows nothing and is literally a blank slate to learn this lesson from a forced reading of this book is expecting too much. It certainly was in my case. It is a disservice to the child and is contrary to the goal of establishing English literacy.
I don't recall that in Huckleberry Finn outside of dialog (I may be misremembering, though; I'm 50 so you can probably guess the year that I read it in).
If it's dialog, sometimes but not always, enclosed in quotation marks, why would you expect correct grammar? People don't talk in correct grammar.
If the entire book is a narration, then the entire book will be filled with grammar as it is spoken, not grammar as it is written.
A few exceptions come to mind (Alan Paton's "Cry The Beloved Country" and some other stories I recall reading that used broken grammar as part of the plot, story or for effect), but on the whole most books have had grammar that follows the rules.
It sounds to me like you may be neurodivergent in some way that made these two parallel aspects of literacy, literature and grammar, hard to disentangle during your education. It sounds like a failure of the education system to adequately guide you or take your particular ways of thinking into account, not a problem with the sort of underlying philosophy of what books we read in school.
However if it is, then I would make the argument that it's exactly the right way to teach it, particularly to young people. As you point out, it's a very fluid language with a lot of rules that are completely arbitrary. As a native speaker, it's more important getting to grips with the, I dunno what we'd call it on here, pseudocode rather than formulaic structure? Concepts over syntax maybe.
I'm from the UK. My immediate family is from Dundee and Sunderland. I had inlaws from Liverpool and Bristol. When we all got together, especially after a few drinks, at no point would an outsider think we were even speaking the same language, but we all had the same common grounding.
I agree with you that it's probably a bad way to teach formal grammar. It depends on the context though
That said, to name one example, I do not think an understanding of adverbs versus adjectives can develop effectively if one is constantly exposed to people using adjectives as adverbs. It causes a loss of nuance that comes back to bite people, especially when it causes friction with those who know better. I remember in the 8th grade, we saw the play 1776, they were singing adverbs ending in -ly and I had no idea what the nuance was aside from the rhyming. I do not think many of my classmates did either.
The common defense of the status quo seems to be blind to the underlying problems in English education. The status quo is untenable since the issues with English literacy are now measurable.
If a child is having that much trouble with it, which would be unusual at grade-level, then the book is above their level. At that point, the child should probably be screened for a delay.
How this generally works is that young people ingest these books, and by doing so their language ability increases to be able to flexibly understand (and use, if stylistically appropriate), non-standard grammatical forms.
That said, I read dozens of English books per year. I am well past the point of diminishing returns for benefits from more reading in English. Reading more books only increases my reading speed , which I have noticed is now 2 to 4 times faster than others around me.
I learned English as a second language and while I did have formal lessons, the most bang for buck learning came from stuff like Huckleberry Finn and forums and random songs (especially hip hop) and cartoons. Not because they are "good english" but precisely because they are "bad english" but still capture the spirit of the language. The meaning is there and it's English as used by native speakers. i.e.: It helped me internalize the language. Maybe it was because I had no one around to practice informal English and I needed that and it's different for native speakers. Dunno.
I can't say it didn't confuse me but I know it didn't negatively impact my scores. Despite not doing my homework and not even having the required textbooks or studying properly, it was the subject I had the easiest time and best grades aside from math or programming. And it's not like the bar was low - we had to pass C1 on the CEFR and I've easily passed C2 and have almost 100% on TOEFL and similar.
Also I'm not particularly gifted with languages - I don't know grammar at all and I struggle speaking all the time even in my native language.
I do not speak that way and I do not know anyone else who speaks that way.
That said, being relatively average at English as a student because I was constantly confused by the literature I was forced to read did negatively affect my test scores.
"bad english" by expert native speakers is different than "bad english" from poor native speakers is different than "bad english" from still-learning non-speakers. IMO the first two both benefit your understanding of the language and help with reading comprehension because they expand your personal knowledge base of how many ways you can convey the same meaning in English with different words, order, grammar, etc and that is crucial for a flexible language like English.
But your reply reminded me of a friend that's very good with languages but only languages that have a rigid structure - he's from the UK but he struggles with English yet he's amazing in German and Chinese and several others I don't remember.
If you aren't on the reading level for a specific book, that's another issue.
I personally did not find the slang & creative language used in such books confusing.
If our society moved from text to video as the primary way to transmit information, would our ability to communicate and comprehend the world necessarily be diminished?
Text has been around for only a blip compared to oral communication. I love reading, and it feels bad to see it decline, but I'm trying to be open-minded about what comes next.
Similarly, _The Metamorphoses_, and _The Iliad_, and _The Odyssey_ were part of an oral tradition and their structures were created to as to facilitate memorization and recitation --- how many poems can you recite from memory?
Marshall McLuhan warned that each extension of what people can do aided by technology is accompanied by an amputation of what folks will do/learn/be capable of unaided:
https://stream.syscoi.com/2019/05/30/marshall-mcluhan-extens...
But originally they were written in the language of the time and in the way that made them easy to remember for contemporaries. They had rhythm, because that is easier to remember. They contained a lot of repetition, because that is easier to remember.
This would have been VERY difficult as Shakespeare wrote plays in iambic-pentameter, a form of decasyllabic verse; which could be considered a kind of very-loose 'checksum'.
The audience member who was pirating-Shakespeare plays would have to recall the dialog-from-the-play absolutely perfectly to render it in the original iambic-pentameter. Possible, but super tricky.
Shakespeare has built-in copy-protection. Renaissance style.
If yes, then how do we know the next tradeoff won't also be worthwhile?
When I was in college, I was volunteered to take notes for a student who had a disability which precluded their taking notes in Art History class, so I would fax my notes to the secretary's office from my Newton MessagePad, which notes included sketches of each of the slides (many of which were not in the textbook) as well as page references to the textbook (since I brought mine in to class and followed along in it during the lectures) --- turns out the notes were shared with the everyone else taking the class in the dorm, resulting in a marked improvement in GPA and a lowered failure rate --- until the textbook was changed from Janson to Gardner a couple of years later.
* Understanding legal documents like contracts
* Filing taxes
* Filling out job applications
* Basically all forms of asynchronous communication
* Every form you’ve ever filled out
Like I’ve read tear jerking accounts of how rat fucked you are in life if you can’t read. A brutal combination of being setup to fail in every interaction, general humiliation, and being utterly left out of society to a shocking degree.
And certainly, although video creation is pretty easy today, it's still dependent on a lot of technology. I can write with a pencil and a notebook.
Waiting for Superman (2010) pretty much covers most of the issues, but can't sufficiently convey the students whose futures were wasted from bad tutelage.
There is an opportunity cost for everything.
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/01/parents-children-par...
Forzani points to research from the UK, where reading curriculums were widely reimagined a few years before the US did the same thing. “They shifted attention to really focus on teaching phonics, which is good and important,” she says. “But then they’ve also seen, ‘Wait, we did too much of that focus and now we lost sight of really comprehending at a high level.’” <<<
Huh?
"Higher level" analysis while have to be built on top of basic comprehension.
And how exactly is phonics (very early "what words are on the page") displacing comprehension (much later; something you do with those words once you have them)?
Being able to read, write and think deeply, analytically and critically is setting the goalposts beyond literacy.
(I understand it's hard to draw hard lines. Literacy affects the degree of language acquisition. People who become literate acquire more language in so doing than people who remain illiterate.)
Without knowing the before and after, it’s not safe to say it’s still very early. Few additional weeks? Few additional months? Few additional years?
At some point and grade a class should be moving past the time-consuming out-loud reading and pronunciation corrections to timed (and silent, focused) reading; and the ones lagging behind get remedial attention.
Otherwise, most of the students are being held back.
I taught my daughter to read when she was 4 and she was reading ~30 page books in kindergarten. Nothing outrageous, but she was pretty far ahead of her class that were still going over ABCs. This was outside of a few other kids who had parents that also taught them to read that were more or less on the same level as her. I didn't bother trying to teach every last freaking phonics rule, I just taught her the different sounds each letter could make and started doing some 2 or 3 letter words each night where we'd sound out different options if the first attempt didn't work. Eventually we talked about "at" versus "ate" and when it mostly made sense to use short and long sounds. I had to relearn some of this myself while going through it. I had to warn her about weird cases a lot, but she caught on super quick. The whole idea though was to get her into those basic 5 page books and then incrementally up the difficulty rather than memorize a thousand rules up front like some poor student taking latin. Phonics is absolutely essential, but I fear that schools go overboard with it.
For some kids, phonics mostly comes naturally. That sounds like your daughter, and myself for example as well. Spelling and pronunciation came easily. I was always the kid who had to flip back to find the page the class was on when it was time turn to read.
But our experiences aside, the fact is that if your daughter’s class was doing 3-cueing instead of phonics, many of her classmates simply wouldn’t learn how to read.
My experience matches yours: My child is now 5.5yo, and reads books up to 8 pages in one sitting, consisting of 3 paragraphs per page, with maybe 12-20 words per paragraph. No pictures in any books.
Here is the conversation between myself and the pre-school teacher when she brought up that he has trouble reading:
Me: What specifically did he have trouble reading?
Teacher: Some of the numbers, such as "Eight".
Me: I was told you taught reading by phonetics?
Teacher: We do. We teach reading by phonetics only.
Me: You don't teach by word memorisation at all?
Teacher: No, the curriculum is phonetics only until the higher grades. No word memorisation at all!
Me: Did you teach the kids how to pronounce 'ight'?
Teacher: No, that is only covered in grade 2 and above.
Me: So how are the kids supposed to know how to pronounce 'Eight'?
Teacher: We teach that.
Me: How do you teach that?
Teacher: We show them the word next to the number.
Me: Isn't that teaching by memorisation of words?
TBH, that was effectively the end of the conversation even though it limped along for another few minutes. The teacher remained adamant that they don't teach by the look-see (or any other memorised-word method), but continued giving examples of words the kids are supposed to know because they had lessons with pictures next to words like "fox" and "lamp", etc...
I am reminded of this xkcd, which I just realized Im about a decade behind on.
Each generation has ups and downs compared to those that came before it. In recent times, short tik toks do seem to be detrimental by leading the brain to focus on receiving constant doses of dopamine instead of focusing on something like a book which requires much more focus.
I'm not saying the sky is falling, but it's different from the introduction of newspapers and radio and TV and even gaming. In the 60s I guess you'd watch a program with your family at night (like Andy Griffith). You weren't raised on monetized YouTube ads and then watching Tiktok all day. I don't think they're adapting at all, but not learning the necessary skills to hold a job. This isn't all Gen Z, but a lot have trouble focusing for extended periods of time, not to mention challenges with communication and socializing.
knowing how to read ("knowing your letters") is not literacy. from an academic perspective the majority of the population is illiterate.
Ordinary language is highly ambiguous, so specific domains have to use words that have been disambiguated for the domain so that people inside the domain can clearly communicate with each other.
Two chemist aren't doing performance art talking to each other because I am uneducated in chemistry so can't follow the conversation.
I read all the time, research papers included. What I discovered is that when I arm tired in the afternoons I can read and reread a paper and not really understand much, but if I read a paper first thing in the morning I never have to reread it for understanding.