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More than 5,000 years after writing was invented, you’d think we’d pretty much figured out how best to teach people to read and write. After all, literacy is an important skill in most societies. But you would be wrong. Not only have scientists long disagreed about the most effective methods, but their debate over how to teach children how to read in English has shaped decades of political “reading.” has provoked war.
On the other hand, many children struggle to achieve standards appropriate for their age. Last year, only 33% of her 9-year-old and her 10-year-old children in the United States were rated as proficient or advanced readers. “The United States has long had a hard time teaching children to read,” says Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. No. There is also confusion about how to teach children to read other languages.
A key battlefield is the teaching technique known as phonics. In America, too little phonics in the classroom is often blamed for poor literacy. Confusingly, however, researchers last year claimed that children in the UK were failing because they were over-taught phonics. It’s one thing to understand how children learn to read, and another to understand how best to teach them. The good news is that once researchers start to participate in the classroom, we can finally understand how their insights can be translated to improve education and ultimately put an end to the reading wars. It’s been a long time.
400 years…
