When discussing the idea of children learning to read autonomously, it is instructive to examine the Whole Language or Real Books method. For twenty years or so, this was the most favoured way of teaching reading, both in this country and the United States. Essentially, what happened was this. Many well educated parents noticed that their children seemed to learn to read without any formal instruction. Their homes were full of books, they read to their children regularly, pointed out shop names, answered questions about the meanings of words and so on. The children apparently absorbed the ability to read by "osmosis". How then, thought some academics, would it be if we scrapped phonics and any systematic instruction at all. Instead of reading schemes we will just leave lots of real books in the classrooms and the children there will pick up reading just as our children have done. There was a political dimension to this, particularly in this country. Most reading schemes such as Peter and Jane feature white, middle class children from conventional backgrounds with both mothers and fathers. This does not reflect our modern diverse society!
The results of this project were pretty disasterous. Here is a piece from the TES from about fifteen years ago; http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=44601 What worked in very special conditions, i.e. the homes of very well educated people who knew all about education and the acquisition of literacy, did not tranfer easily to mass instruction in the classroom. This is why the whole scheme was chucked out and replaced with more effective methods like synthetic phonics.
I would argue that those who promoted these ideas are guilty of the worst kind of trahison de clercs. They devalued the very notion of teaching children to read and left many people with the vague idea that it was neither necessary nor desirable to provide any instruction in this vital skill. So while I do not doubt that it is perfectly possible for children to learn to read informally in very special and restricted circumstances, I do not think it responsible to encourage this as a general practice. This is particularly so now that home education in this country is growing into a mass movement. Inevitably, there will be a lot of parents who do not understand the circumstances in which children can acquire literacy in an informal setting. For every dedicated parent who fills the house with reading matter and watches her child carefully for chances to encourage reading, there will be another who just leaves her child to get on with it. I have been in the past accused of failing to understand the difference between autonomous learning and some species of laissez-faire parenting where the child is just left to her own devices. This is a preposterous suggestion. Just because I am aware of the difference though, does not mean that all the tens of thousands of parents who currently do not send their children to school similarly understand such a distinction.
Simon said,
ReplyDelete"When discussing the idea of children learning to read autonomously, it is instructive to examine the Whole Language or Real Books method."
If there were an intrinsic connection between the Whole Language or Real Books and autonomous home education I might agree with you, but there isn't. Autonomous home educators are as likely to use phonics and other methods as schools.
Simon said,
"I have been in the past accused of failing to understand the difference between autonomous learning and some species of laissez-faire parenting where the child is just left to her own devices. This is a preposterous suggestion. Just because I am aware of the difference though, does not mean that all the tens of thousands of parents who currently do not send their children to school similarly understand such a distinction."
So your concern is not autonomous education, it's parents who think they are educating autonomously but are actually laissez-faire?
I am aware, Sharon, that Autonomous Education is by way of being a broad church. there may well be parents who use phonics and teach their children systematically while still claiming to be autonomous. Never the less, there are also an awful lot who don't do so. I have seen many people claim that their children have learned to read from computer games, for example, and that this is truly autonomous education, when the child decides to learn for her own purposes. I suspect that there are at least two schools of thought about this among autonomous educators. In the piece that I did for the TES, for instance, I quoted from the EO website; My home education % autonomous learning story. The mother there says,"They will read one day because they want to not because somebody tells them to". Her ten year old cannot read, nor does she intend to teach him.
ReplyDeleteI am certainly concerned that many parents who think that they are using autonomous methods are actually just leaving the kids to it, as in the case which I quoted above. Again, it is hard to say for sure because we simply do not have enough figures.
Simon said,
ReplyDelete"I quoted from the EO website; My home education % autonomous learning story. The mother there says,"They will read one day because they want to not because somebody tells them to". Her ten year old cannot read, nor does she intend to teach him."
You seem to be suggesting that I am different from this mother, and possibly not truly an autonomous educator because we use phonics. However, I would have said the same about my ten year olds who have gone on to read at 13. I can't see anywhere in the article where she states she does not intend to teach her children to read. Not pushing children to learn to read before they want to is not the same as refusing to teach a child who asks. How do you square these quotes from the sites she recommends with parents refusing to teach their children to read or laissez-faire parenting?
"we have a family culture that values games and word play, where phonics awareness sometimes seems to permeate the very air"
"We played a lot of games - bought games, homemade games, made up on the spot verbal games. I read aloud for hours while she looked at the pages. She asked questions and I answered. I pointed out interesting signs. She pointed out interesting signs. Her dad recorded tapes of him reading her favorite bedtime books so she could listen to them while he was away at sea."
"At our house, we look at books as being just about as important as food to eat and air to breathe. We get excited over them, we drag them everywhere, we talk about them, we give them as presents, we ooh and aah over the illustrations, we read bits and pieces out loud to each other,"
"She asked questions about letters and words, she followed along in books as I was reading, she started reading signs, we played rhyming games, she started asking me how to spell words, and, pretty soon, she was reading."
"Children who are learning to read usually want to create the written word, too, right along with learning to read it. So we provide lots and lots of writing materials. We include good quality colored pencils, crayons, markers, stampers, stickers, stencils, paint, and anything else that might be fun to draw or write with."
Simon said:
"I am certainly concerned that many parents who think that they are using autonomous methods are actually just leaving the kids to it, as in the case which I quoted above."
Where does it say she leaves the kids to it? She answers questions, provides craft materials, writing materials, takes them out and about, is aware that they are learning to read and write through observation of their activities and questions and recommends the sites that gave me the above quotes.
"Again, it is hard to say for sure because we simply do not have enough figures."
Research has shown that autonomous education can work (Thomas, Rothermel, etc). It's true that we have not taken a random selection of adults who have been autonomously educated and tested them to see how they compare to adults educated in other ways. But how does the current review and planned changes allow us to learn this? The planned changes will end AE as we know it before we can find out if it's effective. Badman suggests that further research into AE is necessary. In his opinion we don't know if AE is good or bad, but he is still happy to end it without finding out.