{"id":84472,"date":"2023-02-16T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-02-16T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=84472"},"modified":"2023-02-13T08:05:10","modified_gmt":"2023-02-13T14:05:10","slug":"the-experts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=84472","title":{"rendered":"The Experts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Remember learning to read?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I do. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We’ll come back to that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Years ago, when I was looking for alternative ways of schooling my kids, I ran across the Sudbury Schools<\/a> . The Sudbury model makes kids responsible for their own education. Radically so – nobody tells them what to learn and when. Literally – there is nothing saying “Kids have to be able to read or do math at a specified level by the time they’re X years old”. Teachers are there to help the kids learn what they ask to learn. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nobody tells kids “Today it’s reading time”. The kids learn to read when they learn to read. Some learn by asking teachers to show them how; some, by asking other kids; others just translate the alphabet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But while nobody tells Sudbury kids when or how to learn to read, they all do – by the time they’re eight, all of them read at or well beyond “grade level”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One Sudbury advocate pointed out – i’m paraphrasing, here – that by age five, children learn a whole language, often more than one, along with a world of other material, all by absorbing it from people and the world around them, in their own ways. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, you have to work hard to prevent <\/em>children from learning. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And at age six (or earlier, now), that’s exactly what the system does for most kids; forces them to abandon their own style of learning, and learn by sitting in straight lines and listening to someone tell them what and how to learn. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They point out that if kids learned how to speak their native language\/s the way they are taught to read or do math or science, we’d have a generation of kids with “Speaking Disabilities”, complete with a class of clinicians earnestly treating it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Anyway – learning to read. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dad was an English teacher, and Mom read to me a lot as a kid. I learned my alphabet, and learned how letters and sounds corresponded, and one day when I was four, I clearly remember driving down I94 to pick up Dad at grad school at North Dakota state in Fargo, and seeing the word “FAR-go” on the sign on the freeway, and saying it out loud to the amazement of my mom and grandparents (but not, I suspect, my infant sister). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Come to learn there are three schools of thought for teaching kids how to read. <\/p>\n\n\n\n