You’ll Have to Teach Your Child to Read Yourself : In 1957, Sputnik Brought National Attention to ‘Why Johnny Can’t Read.’ Unfortunately, the Cure Has Turned Out to Be Worse Than the Disease.

As a society, we’ve always assumed that parents would provide food and shelter for their children, and the schools would teach them to read. As matters stand today, that assumption is no longer realistic. Instead, the evidence powerfully suggests that most of the children in America’s schools today won’t become lifelong readers and--to use a conservative estimate--that one out of four of them will scarcely learn to read at all. Given this reality, there’s only one option for parents who want to be certain their children learn to read. They will have to teach them themselves.

Our nation is producing illiterates and semi-literates at a rate that should be frightening not just to parents, but to all of us as citizens. The number of illiterates in the United States is generally put at 27 million, but Jonathan Kozol, the author of “Illiterate America,” believes that this figure falls short by more than half. Upward of 60 million adults, he estimates, “cannot read enough to understand the poison warnings on a can of pesticide or the antidote instructions on a can of kitchen lye; nor can they understand the warnings of the sedative effects of non-prescription drugs, handle a checking account, read editorials in a newspaper, nor read the publications of the United States Census, which persists in telling us with stubborn, jingoistic pride that 99.4% of all Americans can read and write.”

Each year, the number of illiterates in the United States increases by 2 1/2 million. Slightly more than half of this number are immigrants. The rest--more than 1 million each year--are products of our schools.

What accounts for this calamitous record? I believe that the reading problems in our schools today--and, indeed, the related learning problems--are the direct consequence of a relatively new and universally utilized system of reading instruction that simply doesn’t work.

Our troubles began in 1957, when the Soviets put Sputnik into orbit. Suddenly the United States was confronted with the unthinkable proposition that the Russians might outdistance us not only in scientific achievement but also in the conquest of space. In searching for answers, all eyes turned to education. If our society wasn’t producing scientists who could put objects into space, then education was to blame. Reforms were in order.

With the new determination to create more effective schooling came a twofold government decision, first to get involved in education--primarily by offering financial support to the schools--and second, to make certain that the government was getting its money’s worth.

Whatever alternatives might have been considered, that demand for “accountability” narrowed the choices to one: a system of instruction compatible with a method for testing its effectiveness. The system eventually adopted was based on an old production-efficiency proposition, that the need for a high level of skill development can be reduced if the tasks required of the worker are simplified. As in assembly-line operations, learning came to mean learning to perform a series of discrete skills.

With this system, educators could measure what children had learned and how much more they knew after the learning experience transpired than they had before. The results may have satisfied all the adults involved, but for the children it was a disaster.

The problem is that children can acquire thousands of skills, but the skills don’t add up to reading. Though the system can teach the skills, it doesn’t generate the dedication that ultimately makes a reader. It doesn’t instill a sense of discovery, or unlock mysteries, or create the feeling of empathy, or do any of the other things reading does to produce pleasure.

There is little, if any, pleasure in completing these by-the-numbers tasks.

Children don’t come to think of reading as intrinsically valuable. Instead, they associate it almost exclusively with the educational equivalent of manual labor, and they refuse to do it. A friend of mine, JoAnn Reinhardt, recently recalled the concern she felt as a young mother when her middle son, Paul, failed to learn to read in school. One day, in desperation, she sat Paul down and began to read aloud from a book about the American Revolution. Paul’s interest immediately perked up--possibly because his father, Richard Reinhardt, writes on historical subjects--and within a short time he was reading the book himself. When his mother asked him why he had been unable to read in school, he replied, “Because the stuff they give us isn’t interesting.”

No one disputes that somewhere along the way a child has to learn what letters stand for and how series of letters combine into words. The preschool years are an ideal time for such instruction, because 3- and 4-year-olds enjoy the repetition of simple tasks. First-graders may sit still for such basic work, so excited are they about being in school. But by the second or third grade, most children have learned all they’ll ever need to know about what letters stand for and how letters become words, and further repetition of such lessons bores them. By the fourth grade, for most of them, the indifference will have grown into a general aversion to reading.

Something else, in addition to boredom, contributes to this aversion. That something is fear --fear induced by the all-pervasive testing process made necessary by the government’s demands for accountability.

Never will I forget my own introduction to that process.

It was 1971. I had returned to Southern California following a 20-year journalistic odyssey with my husband through the United States, Latin America and Europe, and had taken a position as a teacher at a school for children with learning disabilities. The tests I was directed to give to my students during my first week at work were unfamiliar to me, but obviously not to them. Like balky horses, they resisted my directions at every step. They refused to sit down. They refused to listen. They deliberately broke the lead in their pencils and then raced one another to the pencil sharpener at the back of the room. I finally managed to assert my authority by physically directing some children to their seats and verbally intimidating others, and after reading aloud the instructions told the children, “Open your books to page 3.”

Twenty-nine of the children did so. The 30th, a husky 12-year-old, stared defiantly at me, his unopened test on his desk. I called him by name and repeated the directions. The boy continued to glare at me. He said nothing with his voice, but his body said, “Make me.” As the other children watched in silence, I walked to his desk, stood over him and repeated the directions once more, but in a voice that said, “Comply.” For an answer, the boy reached into his pocket, pulled out a switch-blade and pointed the knife at my stomach.

How I managed to talk that boy into putting his knife away I no longer remember. I do recall that I shook for days--and that, from that moment, I understood those children in a manner that might otherwise have taken years for me to develop. All of them--not just my tormentor--were veterans, and victims, of testing. Testing had gotten them transferred out of their regular classrooms into “special ed,” and more testing had gotten them transferred from normal schools to one they regarded unanimously as a school for “retards.” No wonder they felt wary about this newest battery of tests.

The negative impact of testing is all-pervasive. Students have been so turned off by the endless series of tests that many school districts have resorted to carnival-like tricks to get them to school on testing days. Many teachers report exactly what I have observed: The anxiety that accompanies twice-yearly achievement tests is so great that pupils’ good feelings about their school abilities, painstakingly built up over many months, can be undone in a single morning. Tests are given with such frequency it often seems that they--not learning--are the purpose for which children are present. Children in regular primary classrooms can anticipate a quiz after each small segment of instruction. Since proceeding to the next segment is dependent on passing the quiz, the pressure is intense. If they fail, they become “special,” with all the psychological consequences such categorization can produce.

Even if they stay in the mainstream, today’s students must continually confront the prospect of failure. Is it any wonder that even the brightest children find the pressures excruciating? Is it any wonder that, though they may learn to read, they seldom become lifelong readers? Who among us will repeatedly and willingly make efforts in which we have little or no confidence and from which we gain little or no enjoyment? No one--children least of all.

No child, no matter how successful, can run the emotional gantlet of today’s elementary and secondary schools without being affected. Whatever intellectual expectations even the brightest children have when they set out for school are quickly dashed and all but destroyed. Thanks to our educational technology, they become convinced that reading is difficult and dull and that it bears almost no relationship to what they need or want to know. The bridge that might have spanned the distance between what they know from direct experience and what they could know from the vicarious experience offered by reading is never constructed.

The greatest crime of all is what this system does to children’s feelings about themselves--feelings that are absolutely vital to their ability to succeed in life. The moment children lose interest, their performances falter. Poor performance inevitably leads to loss of self-esteem. Loss of self-esteem just as inevitably leads to even lower performance, and the cycle continues until, for many, there is overwhelming despair and, for some, even thoughts of self-destruction. One seventh-grade boy told me: “I should be better now at reading words and understanding what they mean, even if I haven’t seen them before. I get in trouble on that, and then I mess up my whole day. Instead of reading on, I think about it a long time. Last year, I called myself a mental retard. I felt, ‘I’ll just kill myself.’ ”

Whatever ailed the schools when Sputnik sent off alarms in American education, it was not as bad as the cure.

As parents, we can press our educators and policy makers to recognize that the mass production of reading failures in our schools today is due not to faulty children but to a faulty system of reading instruction. But we can’t afford to wait for the system to be changed. If our children are to become lifelong readers, or even adequate readers, we must act while they are in the learning stage.

Can parents teach their child to read? Absolutely. A parent doesn’t need any special skills, magical materials or electronic devices to make a child a reader. Dozens of studies in the last quarter-century have shown that parents do teach their children how to read before age 6. And they do it without benefit of teaching licenses or reading systems.

The only skill parents need when they help their child learn to talk is to know how to talk themselves. Reading is no different. The only skill parents need to help their child become a reader is to know how to read themselves.

Parents, in fact, are far more qualified than any teacher to deliver the most significant message about reading that a child will ever receive: that language, whether oral or written, contributes to the excitement, fullness and joy of life. That is the message that children aren’t getting in school. Parents can communicate the message in the simplest possible way, by sharing language with their child in a positive manner.

They are with their child during his or her most fruitful language-learning years. They can give learning a positive emotional dimension by injecting their love and care into the reading situation. They can build their child’s reading program on his or her interests. They can provide an unstressful environment.

If you are a parent, here are some of the things you can do to help your child become a reader:

Start drawing your child’s attention to written language at the earliest possible age.

Begin to develop your baby’s response to written language by rocking or swinging him or her to the rhythm of a lullaby or nursery rhyme.

Develop your youngster’s awareness of the emotional elements of written language by using your voice, facial expressions and body movements to illustrate feelings, and encourage your child to act out the ideas with you.

Build your child’s repertoire of predictable literary patterns by reading aloud every day.

Involve your child by reading in a way that gradually lets him or her take over. Once the child is familiar with a story, leave out key words and let him or her fill them in.

Develop your child’s self-image as a reader by providing books, book club memberships and magazine subscriptions. Go to the library together.

Introduce writing into your child’s life. Encourage him or her to scribble, then copy words, then “write” stories by dictating them to you.

When your child starts to read independently, make sure books are available that will provide intellectual and emotional satisfaction.

Make sure that the printed material you present to your child complements his or her real-life experiences and interests.

Develop your child’s perception of himself or herself as a successful user of language by helping him or her to put ideas into oral and written statements. Mealtime and outings offer excellent opportunities to elicit your child’s thoughts, opinions and feelings.

Give your older children the opportunity to extend their literary horizons and interpret literature by organizing reading and discussion sessions that include the whole family. Make these sessions a regular family event.

In the end, it isn’t reading systems that make children readers. Children become readers when they receive the kind of emotional and intellectual nourishment around reading that only a caring adult can give. I think of Cindy, a beautiful, delightful girl of 11 who was as convinced as her parents and previous teachers that she had a neurological defect that made learning to read impossible. I remember watching Cindy in my classroom one day and saying to myself, “This is ridiculous. That child is no more brain-damaged than I am.” Cindy’s real problem was a fear of failure, which she’d acquired in school. What she needed was a series of successes, and we made sure she got them, beginning with the simplest endeavors. Six years later, Cindy called to invite me to her high school graduation; four years later, another invitation came--to her graduation from college.

Parents who give their children the gift of reading give them, as well, an indelible experience with success, the very kind of experience that so many children are not getting today in our schools. The schools are trapped in 30 years of institutionalized problems. But parents are beholden to no administrator or public official, and to no instructional system. They are free to focus on the single most important task of all: convincing their child that the printed word provides food for the emotions, the imagination and the intellect that can be found in no other place. A child so convinced of this will become a reader for life.