by Ellen Kudlicki

Created on: June 07, 2008

In the bad old days of the Soviet Union, it was against the law to teach any child to read before they were seven. The basis for this law was that you cannot just teach some children to read, you must teach ALL children to read. And psychologically, boys often do not reach the critical scanning mode of reading until they are nearly seven. That was then, this is now.

Now there is a push to teach children to read at young ages. For some children, those with prodigious skills, that's a good thing, but for far too many others the reading programs that are sold to over-anxious young and affluent parents are creating some serious problems that show up down the road. Many children can learn their letters and short words via recognition. For most of us in the Boomer Generation, this was the primary way of learning complex words. But the critical problems with pushing reading at earlier ages is that while the child can recognize and parrot words, they often cannot understand the context. There are similar issues when you deal with synonyms-words that sound the same but are spelled differently. And what is a four year old going to do with words such as "read" or "lead" which can be read two different ways? While building recognition skills is important, it is also essential to teach a child within his or her context of knowledge.

Methods of teaching reading have changed based on the whims and fashions of education. There is no industry more subject to fads than education. For many students, the single-mindedness of such reading programs leave them floundering and thinking they are stupid. Witness those students who have just finished high school. Most of them were taught to read using "Whole Language"-the idea being that words they didn't recognize, they could simply skip without penalty. That may work in second grade, but by the time high stakes testing rolled around, these same children were getting nailed by low test scores in reading comprehension. Unfamiliar words were skipped rather than being deciphered. In my own family, comparing my older two children and my youngest, the reading abilities are wide apart and much of it has to do with the narrow scope of teaching that was sanctioned by the schools. For some students, "Whole Language" was a good way to learn, but by using just that method, other students were left behind. Unfortunately, this scenario set up years of struggle as my son and others like him were constantly running and failing to learn to read because

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