Reading young
At about the same time as I was worrying that kids at nontraditional schools may not reliably master literacy, I was teaching our then-three-year-old to read. We used Starfall.com, which has early literacy games and activities; I’ve also heard good things about a dozen other programs, and used Starfall mostly because it was so easy. Once I’d showed it to our daughter, she’d beg to do it almost every day. If she didn’t ask, rather than directly encourage her I’d start playing on it on my own in the corner, and as soon as she heard the familiar sound effects she’d bound over and demand to play.
By the time she was five, she could read short chapter books, but honestly more important to me was that she could read all the text the world around her had to offer. Instructions for games; subtitles for movies; road signs; product labels; toy catalogues. Literacy makes our world vastly more navigable and vastly more interesting; half of the world’s incomprehensible features have labels on them.
I wrote earlier that I had started to worry not all kids learn to read without focused deliberate support. But I also realized I was profoundly uncomfortable with the assumption that as long as kids eventually learned to read, that was fine. If a kid can learn to read at 4, and instead doesn’t learn to read until age 8 (when reading education is provided for the first time in many nontraditional schools), that’s four years where a fundamental capability that would enrich their lives has been denied to them. I would not only be opposed to the practice of blindfolding children because I expect it to affect their long-term vision; it seems obvious that it is a wrong to the people they are now, who are drastically restricted in the ways they’re able to interact with the world. Illiteracy is similarly restricting. Even if every child will learn to read fine at age 8 or 9 in a nontraditional setting, the delay strikes me as an injustice to the people they are as seven year olds. Reading is fun. Reading unlocks tons of other kinds of fun, from video games to crafts, and tons of other kinds of independence, from grocery shopping to navigating with Google Maps.
Another advantage of teaching kids to read at a young age, incidentally, is that they absolutely love it. Any parent of a three year old will tell you that they thrive on repetition - their favorite book a hundred times, their favorite game for three hours straight. Where a six year old will get antsy in a lesson that involves practicing the same thing over and over, a four year old will often be enchanted.
This was, ultimately, one of the things that left me disenchanted with ‘unschooling’ based approaches - even as someone who had a lot of philosophical sympathy for the unschooling critique of conventional education. I can’t think of anything that does more for a child’s independence, self-efficacy, and ability to pursue a self-directed education than early literacy. I think schools owe it to kids to not just get them reading eventually but get them reading young.
