George, I am NOT the Archtypal Female, and in fact find labels like that as patronizing as Jim's comments that he will challenge me anytime I veer away from talking about feminine, mundane things like tulip bulbs.
Your post presents the opportunity for an interesting example. You imply that I don't know what I am talkng about when I discuss theories of when to teach reading, and that you do. First of all, there ARE several theories, and your comments seem to indicate you are aware of only one, or have decided that it is correct. While I certainly made it clear to Del that there are many good ways to rear a child, and that nurturing was the most important factor, and that I thought he was doing a wonderful job, and also stated that there were different schools of thought on this issue, I also gave what I made clear was my OPINION, based on what I had read and the experiences I had had with my own child. However, besides having a minor in child development, I have read extensively on this issue, and my opinions are indeed based on concrete foundations, given as I said before that there is disagreement in the educational community about theory.
In any event, this is a quotation from psychologist David Elkind, in his book "The Hurried Child", which I highly recommend to anyone wondering how to rear a healthy child in a very stressful world. I left the footnotes off for the sake of brevity, but they are cited in the book:
"Likewise, parents hurry children when they insist that they acquire academic skills, like reading, at an early age. Indeed, some programs now promise parents that they can teach their children to read as infants and toddlers. The desire of parents to have their children read early is a good example of parental pressure to have children grow up fast generally. This pressure reflects parental need, not the child's need or inclination. In the second half of the book we will examine this parental need in more detail. Here we need to look at the evidence that shows that chilren who are being pushed to read early are indeed being urged to grow up fast. It is certainly true that some children gravitate to reading early, seeking out books and adults to read to them. Such children seem to learn to read on their own with little fuss or bother. But such children are in the minority. Studies by my colleagues and me, and by other investigators, find that only 1 in 3 children in 100 read proficiently (at the second grade level) on entrance to kindergarten. If learning to read was as easy as learning to talk, as some writers claim, many more childrren would learn to read on their own. The fact that they do not, despite their being surrounded by print, suggests that learning to read is not a spontaneous or simple skill.
the majority of children can, however, learn to read with ease if they are not hurried into it. Our youngest son Rick is a case in point. He is the youngest of three boys and is very outgoing, social and verbal. He was telling full-length stories at the age of three. He is one of those youngsters who, when you ask him a question, gives you a full and richly detailed answer. Because of his verbal skills I thought he might want to learn to read at the age of four. We read a lot of books together and I asked him if he wanted to learn to read or try reading a book on his own. He did not. At least one reason, I think, was that I would no longer need to read to him and we would lose that time together.
Because my wife went back to school, we placed Rick in a very fine private school where, by the way, there was no pressure for him to read early. In fact, he would sit under the table and do math problems when the other children were reading. The teacher allowed him to work at arithmetic and didn't press the reading. In second grade, Rick became intested in reading and began bringing books home from school. Now, as a teenager, he reads for recreation as well as for school and really enjoys books. I am not sure that this would have been the case had he been forced into reading.
Studies of children who have been introduced to reading later rather than earlier support our experience with Rick. Carleton Washburn, the famed educator, conducted an elaborate study in the 1930's with children in the public schools of Winnetka, Illinois. He compared classes of children who were introduced to formal reading instruction in first grade with those who were first introduced to it in second grade. Although the children who started earlier had an initial advantage on the reading tests used to assess pupil progress, this advantage disapperared by the time the children were in grade four.
Perhaps the most intesting and intriguing part of the study was a long-term follow-up that was made when the subjects of the study were young adolescents and were attending junior high school. Observers who did not know which children had been in which group were introduced into the classrooms; they were to look at all facets of the young people's reading behavior. The observers found that the adolescents who were introduced to reading late were more enthusiastic, spontaneous readers than were those who were introduced to reading early.
These data are also supported by educational information from other countries. In England, studies comparing children who attended informal (late reading) elementary schools and those who attended the formal (early reading) elementary schools reported similar findings. In Russia, formal education and instruction do not begin until children are age seven, and yet Russian children seem far from being intellectually handicapped. Early reading, then, is not essential for becoming an avid reader nor is it indicative of who will become successful professionals.
Other studies suggest that children confronted with the task of learning to read before they have the requisite mental abilities can develop long-term learning difficulties. In one high school, for example, we compared the grades of pupils who had fall birthdays (September, October, November and December) and had entered school before they were five with those whose birthdays were in April, May, June and July and who entered school after they were five. For boys in particular, there was, on the average, an advantage in terms of school grades to entering kindergarten after attaining age five rather than before attaining that age.
Finally, a recent study of children who have been held back or who repeated kindergarten found that almost all of the parents involved in this practice were pleased with the result. They felt that it had given their children, who were socially or intellectually below the norm at that time, a chance to catch up at their own speed. Many of the children were able to join their own age group later. Far from being handicapped by their late introduction to basics, these children were advantaged by the opportunity to move at their own pace . . .
Parental pressure to hurry children academically in the early years can also be seen as a downward extension of the parental concern expressed with adolescents. "Ability grouping," for example, has been fought for decades. Parents whose teenagers operate at a slower pace than the norm insist that these young people be expected to do the same work as their faster-moving peers so that they will not fall behind. The failure of some parents to recognize the limits of their children's abilities at the high-school level has its counterpart in the insistence by some parents that their children be taught to read early. In both cases, parents seem to want their children to grow up faster than what seems reasonable for the children in question. Children should be challenged intellectually, but the challenge shoudld be constructive, not debilitating. Forcing a child to read early, no less than forcing an adolescent to take algebra when simple arithmetic is still a problem, can be a devastating experience for a young person who is not perpared intellectually for the task. A young man of seven who was struggling with reading told me, "I can't read, I guess I'm a flop in life."
So while I warmly appreciate your attempts to support me, George, please don't assume that my opinions come simply from my emotions. I have not cited this, plus my anecdotal evidence of my own child's reading, and a url from the Waldorf School simply to assert that there are differing theories of education which are valid. Late reading is certainly one of them, and my evidence certainly does NOT come from my heart, but from a long study of educational theory. |
