I have no patience for podcasts. I leave it to my wife to decide what gets listened to on long road trips (or, in the winter, when a 1,000 piece puzzle is littered all over the dining table). During our drive back from Savannah, where we spent the week of Thanksgiving and adopted our darling new dog, Carly put on the Sold A Story podcast.
Not only was it a limited series, but it was also getting featured on the apps in some capacity where we didn’t have to endure commercials – all good things. The gist of the podcast: reading levels among kids are at an all-time low. Scores and comprehension had been dropping for years, but it wasn’t until the pandemic the rise of e-learning, combined with parents either working from home or being unemployed, that people realized the absolutely bonkers way kids were being taught to read.
I remember being told to sound out words I don’t know. I remember endless hours of vocalizing parts of words and the difference between the pop of a “P” and the fluff of a “ph.” Reading was a slow, vocalized process that required participation from others who were more skilled in the area.
Lately, though, school children aren’t being taught to sound things out. They use picture books (which is fine) as a source of contextual clues and some guesswork to figure out what the word might be. As one parent pointed out: it’s a charade of reading, an act, but the comprehension just isn’t there.
Some things I have learned of over the years about language and learning:
- Spoken language is inherently learned through listening and conversations with others of the same language group.
- Reading is not inherent. The symbols we attach to sounds is arbitrary and the adoption of these connections must be taught.
- Silent reading is a relatively new ideal. It wasn’t too long ago that all reading was done aloud, and silent reading was considered something of a mental illness.
- So that has me wondering: did humans have internal monologues before they learned silent reading?
- Spoken languages cap out at around 8,000 words. Written languages can have lexicons that span into the millions of words. The English Language, depending on how you measure it, can be upwards of 1.5 million words. Although, the unabridged Oxford Dictionary has about 470,000 words and at any point the amount of slang and jargon in regular English use is approximately 10-14% of our vernacular.
- More words = smarter populations? There is a case for efficiency (Why use 20 words when five will do?) and the idea that most English speakers can get by with a vocabulary of about 3,000 different words on any given day. On average, most high school graduates can identify 25,000 to 30,000 words.
- Still, high schoolers are graduating without knowing how to read. College instructors are welcoming students who were never required to read a text from cover to cover.
- The ability to read is tied directly to one’s writing capability, and both are tied to your ability to think critically. Additionally, one’s ability to write by hand, with a pen or pencil, exercises the fine motor skills essential for everything from typing to painting to installing an IV in a patient.
Causes?
In Sold a Story, the focus is on an internationally-acquired program of a “new way to teach students” that teachers, largely, fell in love with because it required less intensive instruction. The program was paired with assessments that “proved” it worked. One of those “who is watching the Watchmen” sort of things.
The program rolled up into the push for what became No Child Left Behind, which promised to only use scientifically backed resources to teach our nation’s youth. While the new reading methods had research behind it, most of it was quickly invalidated and debunked, but not before the Bush2 administration ran with it.
Can we blame it all on social media? Maybe. Futurists and Luddites alike have wondered why we bother teaching reading and writing if televisions are welcomed into the areas once dominated by books (family rooms and classrooms). You could theoretically communicate with anyone in the world thanks to your smartphone that can record, translate, transcribe, send, and read aloud anything that is in a text format. Beyond televisions, what is it to learn anything in an education system that is now standardized around laptops and iPads?
Are these tools making learning more efficient or more effective? Are things that are learned quickly learned well?
What does a textually illiterate culture look like?