EducationNews.org

Elliot Washor and Charles Mojkowski

I’m 30 years old, but I read at the 34-year-old level.
Comedian Dana Carvey

In a December 2007 New Yorker article, “Twilight of the Books,” author Caleb Crain laments the decline of literacy in the United States, citing a number of studies indicating, “Americans are losing not just the will to read but even the ability.” Crain reports that, “readers are more likely than non-readers to play sports, exercise, visit art museums, attend theater, paint, go to music events, take photos, and volunteer. Proficient readers are more likely to vote. Perhaps readers venture so readily outside because what they experience in solitude gives them confidence.”

While we wouldn’t disagree with Crain’s point, it does beg the question of whether the cause-and-effect relationship works both ways. That is, do experiences motivate reading? We believe they do and, based on our work in developing literate children and young adults, feel that Crain, and perhaps many of those researchers he cites, have overlooked the powerful interchange between young people’s experiences in the world and what they read. We believe that it is these experiences that give students the curiosity and motivation to learn more from text and the confidence to pursue their interests. The cycle of experience and reading—a cycle of life to text and text to life—is at the heart of literacy and learning.

Perhaps it’s equally true that those who vote are inclined to read because they are eager to be more informed about what’s at stake. The same can be said for anyone who plays sports, exercises, visits art museums, attends theater, paints, attends musical events, take photos, and volunteers in the community. Children and young adults actively engaged in pursuing their interests are more likely to read because they want to find out more about what they like to do and get better at it.

The problem is that the life-to-text and text-to-life cycle is not addressed in most schools because it runs counter to the prevailing notions about what should be read, when, and how. By and large, schools ignore the power of students’ interests to provide the motivation to read and fail to exploit the experience-to-reading-to-experience cycle. Instead, schools genuflect to the prescribed canon about what is important to read when.

Consequently, many young people come to associate reading with schooling rather than with learning more about what interests them, both in their broad and focused investigations. What schools teach, subliminally if not overtly, about real-world literacy is actually antithetical to what we wish for our young people. It teaches that literacy is about a set of skills, not a way to engage a part of the world that a young person may care about.

But schools are poorly designed to learn about and respond to what students care about. Therefore, schools create a tension between teachers and students that is revealed in these words of a student at one of our Big Picture Schools.

Jake points out that, “learning by doing and learning by reading—those are two of my main things. It’s a point of contention between me and teachers in general because I feel as though I can teach myself almost anything.” Jake manufactured and designed his own trawl fishing nets for his project at his internship. Jake’s words testify to the broken cycle between life to text and text to life, a cycle damaged by the very pedagogical process the schools put in place.

Students come to understand the broken cycle early on, and they respond in ways that we wouldn't want from any adult or child.. A fourth grader at an elementary school actually read the state standards and said to his teacher, “I read the new state standards, and I've been reading books that are this thick (he made a visual notation with his index finger and thumb about two inches), but now the state standards say I have to read 40 books a year. I won't read that many thick books that interest me any more. From now on, I'm going to read smaller, slimmer books so I can read the 40 that you all want me to read."

Seymour Sarason advocated an approach that appeals to us. He suggested, with tongue in cheek, that schools be prohibited from teaching reading to any student until the student asked to be taught. What, he asked, would teachers need to do in order to have every student ask to be taught how to read?

Our answer is simple: Engage young people around their interests and provide lots of opportunities for them to discover first hand how reading can help them pursue those interests more broadly and deeply. We do not dispute the necessity of skills, but young people need reasons—theirs as well as ours—to practice or develop those skills. As their interests blossom into hobbies and career aspirations, students will be disposed to use and hone their reading skills in order to learn.

Another of our students, Ziary, is preparing for a career in nursing and has become an eclectic and voracious reader, not only of nursing texts but also of home remedy books and medical fiction. Her latest read, First, Do No Harm, examines medical ethics and critical care decisions made by the ethics committee, doctors, and patients at a hospital in Texas. The novel examines issues of quality of life versus longevity, one of her particular interests. Most of the time, she carries with her the Physicians Desk Reference to look up the many unfamiliar terms and medicines.

Schools’ current approach to literacy development, including their approach to assessing it, is actually creating what Pierre Bayard, the French intellectual, calls scientific readers—skilled readers who choose not to read because of what they have learned about reading that isn’t so. Of course, reading is declining because there are so many other options for learning, but we suspect that this overly scientific approach to skills development is contributing to the decline.

Most adults who do read choose what to read based on their interests, regardless of the grade or age level at which they read. In many cases these mature life-to-text reading habits were developed in their younger years through their own desire to seek further information and enjoyment about something nurtured through the culture in their families and in their schools.

Kindergarteners and senior citizens show the same habits and curiosities, regardless of their reading level. The more people access books and use their reading skills, the better at reading they become over time. Literacy is much more about habits of mind than skills development.

Research in another area reveals how such habits are developed. Researchers studying nutrition and dieting have found that whether people dieted or not, they weighed the same and their health remained the same. Dieting and proper food have little impact on health. What did matter? What mattered was what might be called the “long haul” effect. Weight gain is measured by a few dozen extra calories a day that, over the years, add on pounds. The incremental change is not easily measurable in the span of a year or two. It is the accretion of these incremental changes—implicit and explicit choices—that affect weight and health, choices that require disciplined attention to patterns and habits.

Like weight management, we need to help our youth develop habits and ingrained—both tacit and explicit—practices of literacy that will stay with them for the long haul, not short term “measurable results” that do nothing for them in the long run. Over time, reading to pursue our interests changes our habits. It becomes second nature, embedded in the way we come to use literacy as a way to identify new problems and develop insights about solving them and, more generally, as a way to become informed, advance in our careers, and participate in family and civic life.

The observant teacher or parent will be wise to get young adults reading around their interests to bring text to life and life to text in a never-ending cycle. And, in doing so have them unlearn the untruths that schools have taught them about literacy, learning, and life.

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Elliot Washor is co-founder of the Big Picture Company and of the Met School in Providence, Rhode Island. Charles Mojkowski is a consultant to Big Picture. Big Picture’s work is supported in part by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Published June 5, 2008