Why reading?
A couple months ago, I wrote a post entitled “the end of reading,” predicting that in the next couple decades reading would outlive its usefulness and become extinct. And that’s a good thing.
Why?
Reading has a unique role to play in the world of education.
It’s perhaps the only skill we can’t each ourselves.
“But, I taught myself to read at the age of two”, you say!
Not quite so fast…
People who are surrounded by others who know a skill can start to decode it by observing their actions. At some point you put together that letters make a sound and when they are strung together, they make a word. You may not have even realized that was what you are doing. The fact you had parents who knew how to read, passing down multi-generational skills (educational wealth) made an impact.
Also, even in that circumstance, only a small percentage of kids “teach themselves how to read.” We often (I think mistakenly) label these pre-readers as smart or gifted. But I’ve found, early reading skills has little correlation with intelligence or success later on.
It’s a parlor trick.
I signaled out reading because I believe it’s a tool of oppression and also a tool of power.
If you know how to read, you can teach yourself almost any skill. The moment you’re interested, the moment you have a need to know, a burning curiosity, on the opposite side, are avoiding the pain of not knowing, you can figure it out.
But if you don’t know how to read, it’s very difficult to learn something new.
We acquire language naturally. It’s in our DNA.
Reading is a human invention and it most often requires direct, systematic phonics instruction.
A while ago, I interviewed Dr. Rebecca Winthrop, a scholar at the Brookings Institution.
Winthrop has done extensive research on the impact of investing in girls’ education. Her systematic review of thousands of studies shows the profound impact on everything from Human Rights to Climate Change, World Peace and scientific breakthroughs in medicine. The more women we have who are educated, the more advancements we make as a society. ‘But here’s the catch.
Many many many kids go to school and still don’t know how to read. Sitting in a classroom listening to lectures does not equal knowing how to read.
Winthrop got into this work when she was working on Human Rights. Her work shifted when she had successfully worked on a campaign to pass a bunch of new rights for women. She visited the refugee camps and asked the women there what they thought of their new rights.
Their response, “Thanks for the rights. But what we really want is to know how to read.”
Reading is power.
Children want to learn.
Adults who haven’t become too deadened by years of compulsory learning yearn to learn and grow, develop skills they need to feed their kids, to take care of their health or even better, get to the level of abundance where they feel truly free.
Money = food (basic needs)
Money = freedom (higher needs)
Having been part of the homeschooling/unschooling world for nearly 10 years now, I’ve heard far too many stories of unschoolers who get to be 18 and still can’t read or write. But guess what? It’s not just unschoolers, it’s 18 year olds graduating from high school, who sat through 5 hours a day x 5 days a week times 40 weeks a year times 13 years, at least 13,000 hours of compulsory schooling and can’t read.
And they can’t navigate the world they live in.
The more I watch how children learn and the creative ways that families have found to follow their children’s curiosity, the less interested I am in structured, systematic curriculum designed to instruct or reinforce concepts taught in school. The more I see the extraordinary learning that happens in homeschooling, the more I’m interested in open-ended products, internships, mind-wandering and research projects where kids get to dive deep in topics of interest. I become increasingly interested in learning projects with real natural consequences like learning a part for a homeschool orchestra, competing for a science prize or mentoring a younger child. So many curricula are still inspired by school, still designed with this underlying, unspoken drive to do better than school, rather than focusing on rigorous, creative learning efforts to ensure children become thriving auto-didacts, inventors, artists and connected community members. So many curricula are designed with the idea that every child needs to be well-rounded and share the same communal facts, rather than nurturing the unique minds, proclivities and talents of our diverse world.
So many content creators tell me the only way they learn to create compelling work is by creating a lot, creating consistently and observing how their audience responds. They are shocked to look back and see how bad their first piece was. They care because they want their content to reach a lot of people and have an impact. So they are motivated to learn. And yet, at school, we are focused on how we can best “catch” kids using chatGPT (kids who we didn’t notice couldn’t read or write to begin with despite years of direct instruction)
I say all this to emphasize that reading still matters.
You can’t begin to create and create consistently if you can’t read. You can communicate and get the support you need. And it’s even harder to communicate with the people who are ahead of you, because their language is often one of reading and writing.
You can’t even open an app to help your child learn to read, because the app requires instructions that must be read.
130 million Americans can’t read well.
30 million can barely read at all.
In order to help people pass through the port from exclusion to participation in the world of self-directed success and abundance, we need to help them learn to read.
And that door is too often shut to grownups.
There are thousands upon thousands of reading programs for children. But where are the programs for their parents? Where are the programs that give them meaning to reading, that offer practice in the real world.
For all these reasons, I’ve decided to focus on this problem with more intent.
While I believe reading is dissappearing, there are so many people who could improve their lives immeasurably if they could learn to read now.
I’ve started a very simple, raw, unprofessional YouTube series to help parents learn to read with their kids. The whole point of this series is that all you have to do is to push play. If you’re a parent, you don’t need to read yourself to watch these videos with your child, practice the exercises as you go about your day and you can learn right along with them. And even if you do know how to read, you don’t need to know how to teach. You can even ask an older sibling to play them with their younger sibling. They are for anyone to teach anyone to read or learn to read themselves, no matter their age or experience. Heck! Maybe you can read, but you never really learned phonics. No shame. Now’s your chance.
You don’t need to know how to read to start it. Your child doesn’t need to know how to read. It is not dry. It’s not boring. It’s not supposed to be slick or fancy. It’s supposed to be humble and messy, like the brave act of learning to read itself. Let’s read together. Let’s keep it casual. Let’s do it all the time.
And every lesson gives you plenty of ideas how to practice reading as you go about your city.
We rail against the problems in politics today.
But how often do we think about the roots of these problems that have corrupted the whole system.
And the solutions, like reading, that could have a profound, transformative impact on the system of the whole.
And even if we think about systemic solutions or problems, it’s usually as vague as “education.”
We hold up public school as a sacred religion to worship and not disturb.
What actually happens when we think about what is the fundamentally vital piece of education when we break it down. What actually makes education powerful?
I think it’s about community connections and resource sharing and taking care of children who aren’t cared for by their caregivers, and taking care of their parents, and being able ot model yourself after someone other than your family.
And it’s about reading.
The ability to read or not is the divider between any human and everything they could possibly achieve.
We toss around our brilliant “game-changing” educational apps, AI tutors and personalized Montessori schools as if they’re the golden calf, our 2-hour learning strategies, our scientific theories on the best way to learn, as the one solution that will make every child learn.
But what if what people really needed was to know how to read?
And we trusted them to learn the other things they needed to know.
And if that was they key, maybe we could change everything.
To move the trodden down to the elite, to an equal playing field.
To offer a chance for the hard-working, the responsible, the caring to move up in the world according to their motivatoin.
We think reading is easy, because we learned to read when we were little.
But actually reading is very hard.
And lots of people you probably know don’t know how.
There’s something vital that’s changing in the world. More and more people have access to the internet through their phones. So let’s give them a chance to learn phonics through their phones, in the subway, at work, at dinner, while they’re winding down.
Let’s give parents the chance to teach in the best way possible, learning with their kids.
Think about it.
Thank about the possible impact.
The systemic change.
Here’s my new series on reading. It’s in development. Some of them are funny. Feel free to check it out and pass it around.
And have a great day.