Reading First Is Failing:
Attitude Is Being Ignored
by Don Berg, Founder
Attitutor Services “The $1 billion-a-year Reading First program has had no measurable effect on students’ reading comprehension, on average, although participating schools are spending significantly more time teaching the basic skills that researchers say children need to become proficient readers, a major federal report finds.”from Reading First Doesn't Help Pupils 'Get it'By Kathleen Kennedy Manzo,
Education Week Associate Editor
Just as I was posting my four part series on democratic schooling, in which I explicitly articulate how symbol manipulation (i.e. reading) should take a back seat to attitude, this article came out. I was very impressed that a billion dollars a year over the last four or five years was spent to prove my point. Unfortunately, as I pointed out this way of looking at things is not on the radar, so both critics and supporters of the Reading First Program are talking about better ways to force reading instruction on first, second and third graders. They are not raising the question of whether the kids should be given the chance to develop appropriate attitudes and decision making skills then given some choices about how and when to learn to read.
Here's the digest version of why I promote attitude first in opposition to reading first:
- Attitude skills, the ability to access optimal states of mind in any context, is the legacy of life itself with about 4 billion years of proven success.
- Language-based social skills, the ability to control your own and other people's behavior for the common good by invoking mental structures of group identity and internalized social roles in people, is the legacy of some of our earliest human ancestors with somewhere between 50,000 and 500,000 years of proven success.
- Symbol manipulation, the ability to utilize purely cognitive relations instead of physical relations in the world to extrapolate from the past to determine what should and could happen in the future, is the legacy of our agricultural ancestors with about 5000 years of proven success.
- Due to our inheriting a myopic view of human history that proposed that all of existence is less than 5000 years old we have inadvertently put symbol manipulation above the more fundamental skills of participatory social life and the optimizing of our states of mind.
- What is most elementary, thus the most important for elementary school, is attitude and social skills while symbol manipulation (reading, writing and arithmetic) should only be offered within the context of democratic power structures and non-coerced exchange processes as a reflection of how our adult society is supposed to function.
- Symbol manipulation skills can become a barrier to the acquisition of attitude and social skills when instruction is provided through techniques that repeatedly undermine children's individual drive to find access to optimal states of mind and attend to their own social needs.
I predict that the Reading First Program will not see much improvement in the next year before their final report is due, unless someone works hard to cook the books because of political pressure. And I also predict that the analysis, in any case, will reflect the assumed primacy of symbol manipulation over attitude and social skills.
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