Reading Between the Lines: Future Shock?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 28, 2001 | by Woody West

In a nation that often gets giddy with delight over scandal, there's a four-star eruption being overlooked: Our resourceful land utterly is failing to teach its children to read -- a grotesque deficiency. About all it evokes, however, is an occasional tut-tut.

This failure to graft onto young vines the single skill most necessary to survive in a roughly challenging world represents national malfeasance. The latest evidence comes from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Two-thirds of fourth-graders tested scored below the level the federal government judges to be proficient (which probably is low enough anyway), and 37 percent sunk below even a basic capability. Thus, more than one-third of the tadpoles scarcely navigate beyond simple sentences and aren't able to draw logical conclusions from what they read.

For 10 years the educrats have vowed to improve reading ability, but the best that all the king's horses and all the king's men can show is a flat average during that period. An optimist trying not to topple into the abyss of despair might murmur that at least we haven't regressed.

In fact, there has been regression and of the most savage sort. While the average score for the best of the fourth-graders tested increased slightly, scores for the bottom students declined even more significantly. The better readers picked up three points on the assessment's scale; the poorer readers lost seven points.

More money for teachers and smaller classes, chorus the usual suspects; television, parental indifference and the hedonistic culture are the villains. And so forth -- a "dismal discord," in Shakespeare's phrase.

All of the above may be culpable for this social dereliction (though more bucks and smaller classes are liberal mantras rather than demonstrated advantages). The result of lagging achievement in reading is magnified both in high schools, where texts constantly are dumbed down so functional illiteracy is not so apparent, and in colleges, where stunning numbers of undergraduates must be herded into remedial classes.

Another penalty of this inability to read is boredom. Such emotional crippling often leads young minds to spin in destructive and disruptive directions to disguise the stigma of their own sense of failure (pass the Prozac, please).

A corollary is that too many teachers are terrified of their charges, and not always without reason. Compounding this is the torrent of lawsuits alleging the goofiest of supposed rights violations and the equally absurd political correctness of school administrators. Institutional authority has collapsed.

Note especially the fuss about reading methodology. The phonics system was the universal teaching technique for decades; using it, generations of American youngsters achieved literacy -- including tens of thousands of immigrant children, the poor, the disadvantaged and the recalcitrant. But, in the postwar years, a fad called "whole-word" reading swept the educational stage.

Introduction and growth of the whole-word method coincided with the descent of reading ability. But never mind, it was enshrined. Only recently has it been documented as the hollow system it is. California, which had mandated whole-word, came to its senses a few years ago and reinstated phonics. Other states and school districts are following, though haltingly, as whole-word zealots put up fierce resistance.

Now there seems to be a trend toward some combination of whole-word and the validated phonics system. Phonics has the virtue of approaching reading analytically, guiding the pupil to understand the components of language and how it is constructed. This is opposed to the dull drill of whole-word in which a word and object are related and perhaps eventually chiseled into recognition -- at least sufficient recognition to navigate comic books and video games.

In William Dean Howells' novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham, a father admonishes his son, "We must read, or we must barbarize." Barbarization advances briskly in a society in which the ability to read seems stunted at a level of semiliteracy, at best.

Two recent studies suggest this fear is not unfounded. First, illegitimate births in this country have reached a record: More than one-third of all births now are out of wedlock, including 69.1 percent to blacks and 42.2 percent to Hispanics. Second, another study indicates that children who spend extended periods in day care are likely to turn into bullies at an early age.

These two indices mean that more and more children are from homes where traditional middle-class values -- reading, for prime example -- are absent. Which means, in turn, that public schools are going to face ever-greater obstacles.

Red alert! Add "code blue" and "battle stations" -- and for good measure have the chaplain report on the double!