Do kids learn to read at their own pace?
When I started looking for educational options for our kids, I gravitated towards play-centric ones. Five year olds don’t need to spend all their time behind a desk. For young kids, play is learning - it’s how they navigate disputes, explore their interests, improve their motor skills, and discover the world. And play is fun, and it matters if young kids have fun. Their lives aren’t just setup for adult lives that really count; their lives matter now, and should be full of joy and exploration. I liked schools that had no homework, lots of unstructured time, lots of student directed activities - Waldorf schools, Sudbury schools, unschooling-based programs.
But as I read more about play-centric early childhood education I found myself having one profound disagreement with every school I looked at. That disagreement was around literacy. In general, the more a school emphasizes that children learn at their own pace and should spend their time playing and having fun, the less the school emphasizes literacy. I was repeatedly reassured that kids will learn to read at their own pace, that there’s nothing wrong with a kid learning to read at 8 instead of at 4, that every child (barring disability) learns to read and sometimes even there is no need to explicitly teach kids to read, because they’ll learn when they’re ready.
I am pretty worried that that’s incorrect.
At the same time as I’d been comparing early childhood education models, I’d also been digging into the debate over how reading is taught in conventional schools - and in particular into the fairly disastrous effects of many school districts around the country switching from phonics-based curricula to the whole-language approach to reading.
Education research replicates poorly in the best of times and is much shakier when it’s on a current hot-button controversy, so take everything I (or anyone else) has to say here with a healthy dose of skepticism, but my best guess is that when schools stopped explicitly teaching how to sound out words from their letters, somewhere between 20% and 40% of students stopped learning to read, in favor of learning to bluff their way through texts based on context clues. This had catastrophic effects in later grades. I have heard from many teachers of older students who were baffled when they suddenly witnessed a massive increase in the share of kids entering middle school and even high school who never learned to read.
Obviously there are big differences between play-centric early childhood education and conventional early childhood education, and not all the lessons of the ‘science of reading’ debate in conventional schools are applicable to unconventional schools. But picking through the debate over the problems with conventional reading instruction, I saw the same recurring claims: that children will learn to read regardless of deliberate instruction (many of them will, but many of them won’t), that every kid learns to read when they’re ready (an important share of kids don’t), that the important thing is fostering a love of reading (that is important, but so is helping kids develop the skill of reading!)
The most important lesson I took away from the public-school reading wars was that some kids need deliberate structured instruction to learn to read, or they will never learn. Some of them will instead learn to bluff and mumble and guess, convincing casual observers they can read but never having really mastered it, developing complex systems of accommodations. (I think it’s awesome that accommodations for illiteracy exist, but I still strongly suspect people who don’t learn to read are much worse off than people who do). Unconventional schools consistently insist that all their students learn to read at their own pace. Maybe that’s true, but I ended up kind of doubting it. One thing I heard from multiple alumni of Sudbury schools was that some alumni thrive as adults and a substantial percent flounder. I do kind of wonder if in some cases kids never master literacy, learn to guess and bluff, and struggle immensely as adults without anyone identifying the cause.
It would be really philosophically convenient if, in a loving and supportive and literacy-friendly environment, all kids learn to read without deliberate instruction. I think it’s not true. I think it’s not even true of all wealthy, privileged kids with college-educated parents. I think some kids need deliberate reading instruction to learn to read. And I strongly suspect that in any school that doesn’t systematically offer that, some kids will slip through the cracks.
