Reading. Sigh. Let me let you in on a dirty little secret. All children, in a literate culture, learn to read.

Okay -- let’s get the exceptions out of the way. Children with some type of organic brain syndrome (including fetal alcohol effects or genetic disorders), undiagnosed and uncorrected vision problems, and those suffering from some type of post-traumatic stress disorder – including, but not limited to that occurring as a result of child abuse or neglect, or scapegoating and emotional abuse inflicted upon them in the school environment -- tend to have more difficulties than others. Of course, there are exceptions to the exceptions, too.

But putting aside this admittedly sizeable portion of the pre-adult population, all children learn to read. I must have spoken with 5,000 homeschooling parents -- with more than 10,000 kids -- over the past three years, and I can’t remember a single instance of inability to read extending into the later teen years. (I’m sure they exist, but I can honestly say I haven’t met up with any.)

Learning to read is like learning to ride a bicycle. Some kids are presented with training wheels at an early age. Some receive formal instruction. Some watch older siblings. Some are given shiny new bikes for Christmas, just the right size, and some forage some old beat-up balloon-tired Schwinn from a neighbor’s dilapidated garage. Some peddle along on the sides of bicycles made for adults, the only available two-wheelers, so large they can’t reach their leg over the cross-bar or otherwise get to the peddles. For some it takes months to get up the nerve to try. Others just jump on without any preparation whatsoever and ride away. Some are younger, some are older; some end up loving it, and others decide they have more important things to do with their time and energy.

The kids learn to read if there are lots of children’s books in the house, adult books, or just a few old magazines. They learn to read if they are read aloud to from the time they can sit up, or if storytime is ignored. They learn to read if they watch Sesame Street, or the X Files, or if television isn’t allowed in the house. They learn to read even if they are obsessed with computer games that require no reading, or if all they seem interested in is gymnastics or dance or the successors to Pokemon. They learn to read if they have powers of concentration that would put adults to shame, or if they never seem to be able to sit still.

Schools don’t want parents to know this dirty little secret. If they did, school administrators wouldn’t be able to trumpet school ?successes?, or mount campaigns for more funds for ?failing schools?, or hold mom and dad nervously enthralled to hear the report on Susie’s progress on parent-teacher night, or blame the parents for the lack of it. Standardized tests would be known to measure the variables they actually do reliably gauge -- neither student nor teacher performance, but average parental income and average years of parental education in the geographic area surrounding the school. If school districts really wanted to improve test scores, they’d deal with school air quality, which some have suggested may be the greatest single determinant of student performance. (In 20% of schools across the United States, as I learned in almost ten years of working for the Washington State Board of Health, indoor air quality does not meet industrial labor standards for adults, and the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration won’t issue pediatric indoor air standards for fear they might result in the closure of half the nation’s educational institutions, or more.) The dirty little secret keeps parents emotionally and intellectually dependent upon the schools, a dependence they first learned when sitting in those little chairs behind those little desks themselves.

Most teachers don’t want to admit the dirty little secret to themselves. After all, their self-esteem depends upon denial. But give the teachers some credit: to be fair, there are often called upon, rightly or wrongly, to deal with the consequences of poor family or community life. They, like parents, take delight in watching their charges take their first few steps through the doors opened up by reading into the houses of wisdom. And they should, for it is no less a wonder, even if teachers are not in the least bit responsible for it.

The prevailing ?wisdom? asserts that both the teachers and children must be held accountable. So if the child is not ?ready? for reading, they must be ready for ?reading readiness?. Or, if not, the kids must be scrupulously prepared to get ready for reading readiness, if they haven’t learned their consonants in utero.

No one, of course, expends a lot of energy talking about ?bike readiness?, and the idea that there is ?early? bicycling or ?late? bicycling would be considered utterly ludicrous. Teachers are themselves taught that children best learn to read, much as they learn everything else, on their own individual timetables. But when the standardized tests and related hype come down the pike from headquarters, the theory quickly goes out the window.

There are ?methods? to the teaching of reading. The ones we hear most about are phonics and whole language. And here lies another dirty little secret: regardless of the method taught, I have never in my entire life met a single child who learned by either method to the total exclusion of the other. Never happens. Anyone who has ever listened to a conversation in a foreign language and noticed that the language has sounds that make up words that make up sentences that are used in context that result in communication (in some languages, like Italian, accompanied by some critically important hand gestures) can quickly understand why.

Whole language has been around for more than four decades, phonics quite a bit longer. I performed several database searches for articles regarding both methods published in the last 20 or so years, and came up with more than 6,000 of them, and a startling conclusion. Not a single study has ever been conducted on what I would consider to be the only important question: which method of instruction is most likely to result in adults who enjoy reading, and who are best able to use the skill in pursuing their vocational or avocational interests? Not one! It is not a difficult study to undertake (there is a Harvard-based health study has followed the behavioral habits and health indicators of thousands of nurses for more than 40 years). But researchers and teachers and administrators seem more concerned with whether six-year-old Jimmy knows his vowel sounds. This, and this alone, is what has come to be considered as accountability.

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The fact is that learning to read is not particularly difficult, provided one has a reason to want to do it. Indeed, I’d suggest tentatively that the best method of helping your homeschooled child along in acquiring the skill may have most to do with why she wants to acquire it in the first place. (Schoolteachers never get to ask this question, or if they do, they seem trained to disregard the answer.) In watching my two kids, and in talking with dozens of homeschooling parents and their children, I have found that would-be readers seem to come in two garden varieties (of course, these proclivities exist along a spectrum rather than pre-packaged as frozen foods): the code cracker and the information hound. There may be other varieties, I imagine, but they’ve never appeared in my garden.

My younger daughter Meera was a code cracker. We never could read to her, as she never would sit still long enough to listen to a story, and besides, stories didn’t contain anything worth knowing anyway. She learned the letters somewhere along the way -- we don’t remember how, but Sa, Pa, Fa, and Ma (the little phonics quadruplets in the overpriced workbook) didn’t strike her as information worth having either, and so, from her perspective, it was a waste of time.

What Meera wanted was power, specifically the power available to adults as a result of our reading skill. She didn’t like being told what she could eat in a restaurant, and believed that we were holding out on her when it came to the available choices (we were). So she wanted to read the menu for herself. We’d travel to Seattle and back, and when she would ask how long it would be before we reached our destination, she was tired of hearing ?fifteen minutes? or ?soon? -- she was convinced we were lying (and, from her perspective, we were). So she needed to figure out the names of the various exits on the highway, and plot time/velocity/distance ratios in her head. (Five- and six-year-olds do this, one quickly learns.) She wanted to be able to read the food labels in the grocery store, so she could better participate in the decision-making process -- after all, she’d have to eat this stuff. What did the sale flyers say that came inside the newspaper? (Given the opportunity, she still loves to shop.) Could she help pick out our next video rental, sort the mail, or figure out where to call to learn how to ?lose 30 lbs. in 30 days?? (At age 5, she weighed all of 33 lbs.)

She simply wanted to crack the adult code. None of this, she quickly figured out, was going to be found in books. That’s not where power lay. And Sa, Pa, Fa, and Ma was not going to be an especially efficient way of getting it. Meera learned to read music about the same time she learned to read English. She didn’t need to, as being a very gifted pianist, it was easier to learn all of her Bach and Beethoven by heart, but she was tired of being looked at as the baby at her teacher’s student recitals. All the other kids, much less gifted, brought music up to the piano, and she wanted to as well. Now, of course, she can sight-read almost anything. Her reading of English was helped along by the fact that her book of Gershwin songs had the words printed along with the piano music, and if she could follow along quickly enough, she could double the entertainment power of her musical prowess with her family, relatives, and friends by singing along with her playing.

For the code cracker, a little phonics might help, but it is not a particularly effective way for her to get where she wants to go. So she trained us to give it to her straight. The more efficient way is to memorize whole words, and the context in which they are likely to appear. This will lead to some interesting reading malapropisms as new words are mastered. After polishing off a short biography of Helen Keller, Meera told us insistently that following four years at Radcliffe College, Keller ?grad-a-too-tooed with horns? (graduated with honors), and grew into a beautiful ?duck-a-tack? (an educated woman?). The main point is that the approach she took to reading (with our assistance) needed to satisfy her need for meaning (and for power!) rather than ours for teaching (an expression of the same).

My older daughter Aliyah was an information hound, although it took us awhile to cotton to it. She (and we) enjoyed the warm and fuzzy family togetherness as we read the incomparable Vera Williams’ trilogy A Chair for My Mother, Something Special for Me, and Music, Music for Everyone, would add the necessary missing words as we recited Maurice Sendak’s Chicken Soup with Rice, and was captivated, at least initially, by the library videotapes of ?Reading Rainbow?. We would make little books out of her own stories, which she would spend many happy hours illustrating.

Looking back on it, we had a wonderful time in the ?reading readiness? years, but other than watching us exercise our literacy skill, I’m not sure it had any significant effect on Aliyah’s future reading whatsoever. I suspect she actually didn’t want to read for a time because she (correctly) figured out that she would lose the closeness of the storytime experience; she also realized that the stories she made up in her head were at least as interesting (to her) as any to be found in the volumes we lugged home from the library.

What pushed her over the reading edge, finally, was a keen awareness of our ignorance. She came to the hopefully not-too-harsh realization, having executed an exhaustive environmental scan of our impoverished brains, that we knew absolutely nothing about wolves or wildlife habitat, birds, trees, or marine life. Having come to the conclusion that her parents, for all their good qualities (thank you), were pretty hopeless for the kinds of things she wanted to know, she went from no reading at all at six to college textbooks on cetaceans at six-and-a-half. Aliyah enjoyed some fiction, too, but wouldn’t take on a book until she read (or had us read to her) the last chapter first. Why put in all that energy if you are only going to be disappointed? In hindsight, instead of (or in addition to) reading to her Helen Lester’s hilarious It Wasn’t My Fault or Mitch Inkpen’s If I Had a Pig (both of which my wife and I adored), we should have been paging through Scientific American.

The information hound often has a rich conversational life (and vocabulary) developed at whatever age (but before extensive reading), so she can put a little knowledge of phonics to good use almost immediately as words are placed in contexts she can understand. Unlike the code cracker, who may be satisfied with the knowledge to be gained through the reading skill once the desired power is achieved, the information hound is more likely to want to luxuriate in feeding her head. While the code cracker tries to find the required information as quickly as possible, uses it, and moves on (my wife Ellen used to call Meera a ?Dragnet? reader, and it still well applies), the information hound simply seeks input, often for its own sake. The code cracker needs exactly the right book at the library, and utilizes the encyclopedia to obtain facts. The information hound will often enjoy being given the elementary, middle, high school, and college versions simultaneously of whatever subject matter she is interested in (and we early took to this practice when we brought Aliyah to the library), and will sleep with miscellaneous volumes of the encyclopedia open to seemingly random pages next to her pillow. The code cracker will always press the ?search? button; the information hound, ?browse?. The code cracker will enjoy playing ?Jeopardy?, while the information hound may easily become offended at being asked questions for which she knows you already have the answer.

The information hound may also find values in written material neither intended by you nor even by the author. My favorite example of this in our household occurred when Aliyah was ten. We both watched an entrancing show on public television about fractal geometry and the Mandelbrot sets, those wonderful repeating spiral designs that apparently can be found throughout the natural world. Following the program, Aliyah asked me to get some books from the library on fractal geometry. All the available ones were college textbooks, well beyond my own current mathematical capacities and certainly beyond hers. Nonetheless, she took one of the textbooks to her platform bed, where it remained open for the next six weeks. When the library began to pester me, I asked her whether I could take it back. Aliyah burst into tears, pleading with me not to return it.

?Ali,? I said, ?You really didn’t understand much of it, did you? I mean, I sure didn’t.?

?No,? she agreed.

“Well, why then can’t I bring it back to the library?”
?Because,? she sniffled, ?Because it reminds me of how much I have to look forward to.?

Eventually, of course, if all turns out well, the code cracker sees there is more to reading than a hammer to be used in power relationships, and the information hound figures out that knowledge may have more uses than personal entertainment. And off they go on their merry ways. So we learn to relax and enjoy it, and realize that, in the ultimate scheme of things, we – parents, teachers, or simply adults who take delight in children -- already had our turn, and are only along for the most glorious of rides.

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(No consideration of reading is complete without a nod and a wink toward Frank Smith’s masterful Reading Without Nonsense (New York, NY: Teachers College Press, 1997). There is probably no single book that is more widely purchased and read by future public school teachers, and more thoroughly forgotten and ignored in teaching practice. Dr. Smith’s thinking can be summed up in four simple sentences: 1) All methods of teaching reading can achieve some success, with some children, some of the time; 2) Children seem able to learn to read despite the method of instruction that is employed; 3) Children cannot be taught to read; at best, we make it possible for them to learn to read (and that’s probably being charitable); and 4) We do not have to train children to learn, or even account for their learning; all we have to do is avoid interfering with it.

David H. Albert is the author/editor of three new books – Homeschooling and the Voyage of Self-Discovery: A Journey of Original Seeking, and a two-volume set on the uses of storytelling titled The Healing Heart. Sample chapters can be found on his website – www.skylarksings.com David invites your comments, and is available for workshops and lectures in your community; write him at shantinik@earthlink.net