Peter Greene reveals here why he loves to read. What is reading for? It is utilitarian, to be sure. It would be impossible to make your way in the world without knowing how to read nowadays.
This post focuses on the author Rebecca Solnit, who writes about reading and its pleasures.
Greene writes:
It is easy in the ed biz to get caught up in things like the reading wars and test results and arguments about whether or not Pat can read and if not why not. And in our very utilitarian reformster-created status quo, some lapse far too quickly to the discussion of reading as a set of Very Useful Skills that will make children employable meat widgets for employers on some future day, and therefor we shall have drill and practice and exercises to build up reading muscles for that far off day.
“But let’s not kill the lifelong love of reading,” is a common reply, and one that I’m not entirely comfortable with. It’s fuzzy and reductive. I can love peanut butter and jelly, but that doesn’t really open any windows on the world; I don’t love science, but understanding it at least a little has enriched my world. The act of reading is wonderful in a sense, like looking through a pane of glass in an otherwise dull and impenetrable wall. It’s magical, yes– but what’s really uplifting and life-changing is what we can see on the other side.
The reading technocrats and pure phonics police are focused on the future, and even the lifelong love of reading camp is looking forward. Both run the risk of forgetting that reading is useful for children right now, this year, this minute, as a way of finding answers to fundamental questions– how does the world work, and what does it mean to be fully human, and how can I be in the world? Reading gives children access to answers beyond their own immediate experience which is always limited and all-too-often, as in Solnit’s case, severely limited by the control of adults who have trouble working out answers of their own. In the crush to provide reading instruction that will benefit children someday, we shouldn’t overlook the ways in which reading will benefit them right now. Both reading science and lifelong love camps stand at the window and say some version of, “Let’s look at this window. Let’s examine it and study it and polish it and enter into a deeper relationship with it,” while anxious children hop up and down on their toes and beg to look through it.
Solnit likes the wall metaphor. I’m fond of windows. You can pick your own favorite. I just want to argue that we not get carried away by either the desire to reduce reading instruction to hard science or fuzzy emotions, that we not forget that there’s an actual reason for children to read, and that the reason exists today, right now. Don’t get caught up on the trees in the larger reading forest. The children are small people, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t working on big questions. School should help.
After I read this post, I ordered Rebecca Solnit’s book as a gift for a grandson, who will love it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
World View
The window on the world
Is really not a fixture
As universe unfurls
The window just grows bigger
It’s funny. I just watched this very interesting talk that discusses precisely this idea
Beautifully said, SomeDAM!
Yeah, and what we need to teach to kids is to fearlessly keep their eyes on this ever expanding window.
Great piece, Peter!
As a teacher of literature, I often get the “why should I bother?” question from students. And my answer is always, well, if you do bother, you will have experiences that will mean a lot to you. But you have to understand that literature works in a different way than treatises do. You have to enter into the work in your imagination. You have to go there, into the work, and have that experience. It’s like the old joke about how many Vietnam veterans it takes to change a light bulb. Answer: “You wouldn’t know because you weren’t there, man!” Well, to figure out why poems and stories so valuable, you have to learn to take the author’s trip. You have to GO THERE as you read. And if you do, you will have experiences, and some of these will be deeply significant to you. This significance of the experience is the way in which literary works “mean.” And it’s different from the way in which nonliterary works mean. It’s a lot weirder. And it’s up to you to take the trip. It’s possible to have “read” a lot of literature in school without having really done that, ever. And if you’ve done that, you will have missed why it’s so valuable.
Asking ” what is the purpose of reading?” is a lot like asking ” what is the purpose of life?”
If you think the answer to the latter is “work and make money,” you probably also believe that’s the answer to the former.
But some fool might actually believe there is something more to both.
Thanks be to all the gods for such fools and that you, SomeDAM, are one of them.
SomeDAM: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/03/17/three-meanings-of-meaning/
Are you suggesting that the important questions about who you are (that was Greene’s main point I took from his essay) transcend other purposes for reading? If so, I concur. If we are about the important things in life, reading follows “as the night the day.”
Love the Hamlet quotation, RT. An essay on that very topic–the narrative impulse and “who we are”: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2018/11/30/what-makes-humans-human/
This is beautifully written post. The ultimate goal of reading is thinking according to Frank Smith. Meaning and feeling are the main objectives in reading. In order to reach this “nirvana,” there are many elements students need to be able to apply to reach this point. However, a steady diet of these elements without some connection to actual reading kills motivation.
I have taught many students the could not read in their first language to read in English. While it would be more efficient to teach these students to read in their home language, With the absence of a bilingual program, it is what ESL or ENL teachers must do. It is possible to teach students to learn to appreciate the written word while working on “phonics.” Drill and kill are deadly dull. The current “reading wars” are nothing new. We went through this before after “A Nation at Risk” came out.
The “science of reading” is being promoted by the same group of people that are behind privatization. They are the same people that are making the NAEP scores in Nancy Bailey’s post seem like ‘Armageddon.’ This group lies most of the time in order to disrupt! The hidden agenda behind the “science of reading” in my opinion is to sell a lot of products. Computers are excellent tools for focusing on discrete bits of information. Phonics are discrete bits of information. It is marriage made in heaven. $$$$$https://dianeravitch.net/2019/11/13/nancy-bailey-who-is-to-blame-for-poor-naep-reading-scores-here-are-their-names/
“Computers are excellent tools for focusing on discrete bits of information. Phonics are discrete bits of information.” — Are you implying that words learned the “Chinese way” as whole words, are not discrete bits of information?
But you are correct that phonics are more efficient than the “Chinese method”. Just like binary is much more usable and efficient for computers than, say, decimal system, phonics, teaching only a limited number of letters and their combinations is infinitely more flexible than a system where each word is a thing in itself.
By the way, in China most computer users type out their Chinese in transliteration, using the standard Roman alphabet keys. To generate a character, they type out its sound according to the same spelling system—called Pinyin. Wow, the Chinese use phonetical method to type their glyphs, who might have thought.
Lloyd, did you respond here? I have heard that the same glyphs may be different words depending on intonation, so the way you “sing” determines the meaning.
Learning to read? Important? Obviously. But what does one read; Shakespeare et al or pornography? AND learning to read as in all subjects. Instilling a love of learning and seeking wider parameters of perspective. Opening one’s eyes to the world around them, to think clearly et al.
Do not lose track of the forest for the trees.
Nor should we lose sight of the short time we will see children. When they leave us reading, their eyes will turn to different things, as well they should. Perhaps they will pick up Dickens, foreign in its Victorian phraseology, as they grow into it. Perhaps they will come to read the great Russian novels or focus on poetry. Heaven forbid they should read history, for the cynicism promoted by that endeavor might lead to despair.
Perhaps they will spend their lives reading at a table well set, and they will spend their lives in the virtual reality of the French Salon, immersed in all of it. That is my dream.
It is less likely that many students today will develop and appreciation of the classics if bird brained “close reading” behaviorism dominates instruction in public schools. If anything, the gap between the “haves” that attend fancy private schools to prepare for the Ivy League and the “have nots” will widen. Access to education is a devious form of social engineering. The classics have to be introduced to students in order to be appreciated.
Frankly, if reading pornography is what it takes to get kids interested in reading, then it serves a purpose. Better to read it than watch it. Then they will make the connection that reading is about whatever they want to get out of it, not just a chore that you perform because someone makes you.
Thanks, Peter Greene, for starting to break through the foggy thinking on this topic. Reading is not an end in itself. It is a means of learning about the world. I recently read Chekov’s “Peasants” and now I have the most piercing knowledge of Russian peasants (and one more piece of the puzzle that shows the human condition). I did not build up a reading muscle in my brain because no such muscle exists (as the new science of reading shows –I think Greene errs in disparaging this science). I read In the Garden of Beasts and I have fresh knowledge of what the rise of Nazism looks like (and new sensitivity to analogous developments in USA today). Both texts gave me lots of tangential knowledge that would take too long to enumerate here. They are gold mines. Reading is a tool for giving us knowledge. And this knowledge, in turn, makes us better readers and thinkers. But today’s teachers have been training to denigrate knowledge, so this concept does not compute (“What, all my ed school professors were wrong?!”). They think school’s main job is to give the power to read, not what reading uncovers. If kids want build up knowledge reserves, teachers imply, they can gain it after they graduate from high school. This is a regrettable attitude. Because it’s knowledge itself, not the power to find knowledge, that nourishes and grows our minds. By fixating on the skill of reading (what E.D. Hirsch calls educational formalism), instead of the rich knowledge we can gain by reading (and other means), teachers are starving the minds of our children.
Is reading only a tool for knowledge? What if a kid likes to read fantasy books? Or romance? Are those books useless because they don’t contain “knowledge”? Or are things like imagination, wonder, connection to the human race, or just plain escape important too?
“Knowledge” is a big tent. Sometimes we read for self knowledge. Sometimes we read for knowledge of others. Sometimes we read for knowledge of ourselves. Sometimes we read for knowledge of worlds that aren’t but could be, maybe, if we worked at it. Knowledge is the tinder of imagination. It is a source of wonder. Knowledge of others IS connection. And it’s never JUST escape.
Allow me to share a story. A friend of mine teachers 5th graders. They were doing some required Common Core-y exercise that happened to mention vultures, and she got off onto a tangent about birds of prey and food chains and how there are fewer predators than preyed upon and its all because of the calories lost at each level in the food chain that big, fierce animals are rare. The kids were fascinated, she said, and crawling over themselves asking questions. And then her AP walked in to ask how the test prep was going. She immediately went back to the exercises about “finding the main idea” or whatever clap trap they were supposed to be doing. After a while, the admin left, and the kids asked, “Can we go back to talking about vultures?”
I’m with them. Let’s talk about vultures.
I don’t disagree with you, Bob, but Ponderosa’s posting history makes it clear what he means by “knowledge”: facts regarding the world as it exists. Ponderosa draws a sharp boundary between knowledge and imagination and there is little need for the latter, except perhaps as it may be related to innovation and invention. But the type of imagination involved in playing and fantasy and make-believe? Useless.
Fantasy novels are part of the world.
Newbery Award Author, Lloyd Alexander, wrote, “Children learn to read for the same reason they learn to ride a bike. They know that both will take them where they want to go.”
The true purpose of reading is data. We must determine the fastest way to teach reading so we can scale! it! up! and collect the most data from the youngest customer-citizens. Newborn infants must learn to recognize product labels and descriptions immediately so they can have their clicking preferences surveilled to create predictive data profiles that will last from cradle to grave. As for reading to enrich children’s lives, Common Core architect David Coleman put it best: “Nobody gives a $h!t.” Remember what Ralph Waldo Emerson said about why he wrote, “Screw meaning, it’s all about the money, baby, that hot, nasty cash.”
I got a wonderful picture today of my 4 month old granddaughter sitting in her daddy’s lap reading a board book together. Her hand is wrapped around her father’s and her eyes are fixed on the book as they explore together.
LOL, LeftCoast, finally someone who really understands reading and its purpose! Has your check from the Gates Foundation arrived yet? Perhaps we could get you to do a TEDTalk.
This is anti-phonics propaganda wrapped into a warm and fuzzy “books are great” message: “The reading technocrats and pure phonics police are focused on the future, and even the lifelong love of reading camp is looking forward. Both run the risk of forgetting that reading is useful for children right now, this year, this minute.” His message intends to hit parents below their waists, saying, “see, what those reading technocrats and pure phonics police are doing to your kids? This is torture! Your kid is struggling through vowels and consonants and diphthongs and silent “e” at the end and silent “k” at the beginning of the words while he could have already been reading, opening a window into the big world!” Peter Greene conveniently forgets to say that proper phonics instruction takes only one semester and then, indeed, the big window opens, when a child can read anything – ANYTHING -, while those trained with, um, alternative methods, learning several hundred words a year, are subjected to strict regimen of adapted watered-down readers, and then hit the wall by middle school, when they cannot memorize new words anymore. Then they are branded as dyslexics and cast away: “their family situation is difficult”, “they drink poisoned water”, “they are too poor”. Right, it is all because they are poor, not because they were not taught properly.
Every time you put words on a page here, you display your ignorance of teaching and learning. You are not here to learn or even offer a reasoned critique. I find it hard to understand the impetus you feel to post your useless diatribes.
Quelle, dear, everyone does your freaking phonics already. You might as well be posting screeds about how people would be able to get around faster if they just started driving cars.
Yes, learning sound-symbol correspondences is essential. Some few are able to do this with no direct instruction, based on general pattern recognition abilities, but we’ve been there, done that with this discussion. Almost everyone understands that there is no dedicated hardware in the brain for interpreting sound-symbol correspondences and that these have to be taught. Phonics instruction is pretty much universal in our elementary schools now and has been for a long, long time.
But there is a lot more to learning to read. Here, a dive on that: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2017/09/02/on-the-pseudoscience-of-strategies-based-reading-comprehension-instruction-or-what-current-comprehension-instruction-has-in-common-with-astrology/
And, ofc, kids have to care to do the thing we ask them to do. You so casually, so blithely, dismiss poverty and its effects on kids. I assume that you know that kids from poor, less educated households hear millions fewer words, before they come to school, than do kids from affluent ones and that they are exposed to thousands fewer syntactic constructions and far, far less vocabulary? And I suppose that you might, if you thought about this for a moment, see why being hungry or cold or without eyeglasses or worried because you and your Mama are going to be kicked out of your apartment because there’s not enough money for the rent or because your older brother just got beat up or shot might cause a child not to care very much, at this moment, about the schwa sound.
Whatever follows “All we have to do is” is usually going to be so much claptrap.
Quelleprof: when I read Greene’s essay, it only seems to say that it is important to remember than children are in the now and need to be taught in the now. Did you get offended at the idea of a “phonics police?”
Me thinks the lady doth protest too much.
No, RT, I did not get offended by “phonics police”, but this marker immediately allowed me to check Greene’s blog entry as anti-phonics propaganda.
Bob, how long is “long time”? One year? Ten years? Twenty? Just a year ago WSJ wrote, “Many schools in New York and nationwide just pay lip service to the importance of daily phonics lessons in early grades, or don’t know how to instill the basics.”
“Despite the landmark 2000 report by the National Reading Panel, researchers and teachers say many schools haven’t fully embraced phonics. One kindergarten teacher in lower Manhattan, for example, expressed frustration that his supervisors discourage him from making sound-spelling relationships a primary focus. He said “phonics is sprinkled in,” but his bosses want children to spend more time memorizing high-frequency words, and guessing by looking at a first letter and a picture clue.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/schools-seen-as-falling-short-in-a-pillar-of-teaching-reading-11545832800
Emily Hanford’s documentary, which she did this year, says, “One excuse that educators have long offered to explain poor reading performance is poverty. In Bethlehem, a small city in Eastern Pennsylvania that was once a booming steel town, there are plenty of poor families. But there are fancy homes in Bethlehem, too, and when Silva examined the reading scores he saw that many students at the wealthier schools weren’t reading very well either.”
“At a professional-development day at one of the district’s lowest-performing elementary schools the teachers were talking about how students should attack words in a story. When a child came to a word she didn’t know, the teacher would tell her to look at the picture and guess.”
“The most important thing was for the child to understand the meaning of the story, not the exact words on the page. So, if a kid came to the word “horse” and said “house,” the teacher would say, that’s wrong. But, Harper recalls, “if the kid said ‘pony,’ it’d be right because pony and horse mean the same thing.”
https://www.npr.org/2019/01/02/677722959/why-millions-of-kids-cant-read-and-what-better-teaching-can-do-about-it
This is 2019, not 1985 or 1955. And Bob, “your freaking phonics” is a marker too, which dilutes anything you say regarding reading and literature instruction.
Ah, yes. Between Hanford and the WSJ who else could we possibly consult? Your choices of resources are so skewed that it is hard to “listen” to you. I was embarrassed for NPR. As a retired special education teacher, I am well aware of the importance of phonics instruction to many struggling readers. However, I am also well aware that none of those readers are captured by the sound-symbol correspondence. It is only a tool to allow them to get excited by the deep, lush content of whatever genre of literature happens to capture their fancy, from anthropology to poetry.
That commenter is a troll.
Don’t feed the trolls.
speduktr, do you mind pointing to the most glaring issues with these reports? I am more interested in factual errors, not in supposedly skewed conclusions.
Thank you for pointing out that phonics is just a tool. If I were allowed to correct your statement I would say that phonics instruction is important not only “to many struggling readers”, it is essential to any beginning reader. When done correctly, students learn to read and write simultaneously, within one semester. After that they can “get excited by the deep, lush content of whatever genre of literature happens to capture their fancy.”
“Proper phonics instruction takes only one semester”—huh? My mother was teaching me to sound out words at 3yo, & I was still doing it in 1st & 2nd gr & I still do it today as needed, in 3 langs. As for 2019 [vs 1955 or 1985], I see different schools’ PreK & K groups every week for Spanish, & I see what they work on: first alphabet recitation & letter-practice, then phonemes, then bat-cat-hat-pat etc—not as sight-words or ‘whole words’ or guess-from-the-picture; they’re focusing on how to spell the “at” sound & how to make words out of it. Phonics is not some packaged one-semester “reading science” product. It’s a tool, a basic plank in early stages of balanced literacy, & threads through the whole. Dyslexics often need some special tools [NOT intensifying phonics practice]: two of my siblings have it, & for them it’s lifelong. They really DO have to develop a sort of neurological “muscle,” & use it regularly or it atrophies, so my brother tells me [an avid reader at 64, w/no TV set.] It’s like they don’t easily shut off a sort-of 4-dimensional vision [b,d,p,q for example]. My sis is a longtime SpEd teacher now an asst principal; she can & does read anything—but can’t proofread.
bethree5 , there is no “at” sound, there are two distinct sounds “æ” and “ʈ”.
Sorry, I don’t teach reading, & not up on the precise terminology. Just reporting, something that looks a lot like phonics goes on in PreK’s & K’s today, just as it did for me in the ‘50’s & my kids in the ‘90’s.
What you’re getting here, & from Greene’s article, is not “anti-phonics” propaganda per se. It’s anti 30 yrs of ed-reform propaganda. The general MO of those groups—which have undue influence on fed & state ed policy, & whose press releases are gobbled gullibly by mainstream media—includes setting up stawmen like claiming US literacy is in terrible shape due to X, which can be solved simply by doing Y. There is always a dearth of research behind the claims, and unreliable measuring tools, and a hidden agenda [selling a product or privatizing schools or lowering taxes/ underfunding ed].
The bitterness you hear here is the sound of teachers being micromanaged by biz types kowtowing to the ed policy du jour. That results inevitably in phenomena like phonics being under- or over-utilized in some K-3 classrooms. But you have to take claims that such errors are uniform & widespread w/a big grain of salt, & consider the source. US K12 ed is highly decentralized. If some article broad-brushes the reading methods that are taught behind the doors of roughly 720,000 PK-3rd gr classrooms, ask for the research.
Very well said, bethree5. I don’t believe any of us could have said it any better.
answering you below in the 2nd round
I think we can make the anti-utilitarian argument in education even more general: a subject in school should be taught and argued for its own interest instead of its applicability in “real world situations” or in other subjects. Beauty and excitement stimulate the mind and imagination much more readily than some artificial application cooked up by various adult interest groups.
Merry Xmas to y’all!
My holiday wish: that every child receives a book (at LEAST one, if not more!) for the holidays.
We’re luck: every Chanukah, our daughter buys my husband & I TWO books each.
(She’s a writer who worked at two bookstores, one, the Borders of Ireland, where she filled in as the Children’s Section Manager–a great job! {meaning, of course, that all the stores went under} & the other in SF, a terrific, longtime independent bookstore still going strong.)
I plan to buy Slaying Goliath at our own wonderful independent bookstore, & hope you all do, too.
May 2020 be a year of good reading…for all children & adults.
I agree totally. I teach first grade at a school that teaches reading through explicit phonics, and we spend a lot of time in it. But we also read a lot of great children’s literature, as read aloud, such as Pinocchio, The Trumpet of the Swan, Beatrix Potter, and Winnie the Pooh. Plus many, many more contemporary titles. Reading aloud for pleasure, helps them understand that they won’t always be reading MAC and Tab, that there is a whole universe of stories out there.