Should we teach our children to read and write?

For at least three and a half thousand years it has been thought a good idea to teach children to read and write, whether or not they actually wish to do so. A clay tablet dug up at Nippur in Iraq dates from around 1700 BC. It reads, in part, 'My teacher said "Your handwriting is unsatisfactory" He caned me'. This gives us some idea of how ancient this idea is. For the last few decades or so though, the notion has circulated that it is in fact neither necessary nor desirable to teach children these skills in a structured way, particularly if they are reluctant to learn. There is a bit of a problem though with this relatively new approach.

A huge body of research dating back centuries amply demonstrates the advantages of teaching children to read and write. A good deal of these data lead also to the conclusion that the earlier children read, the greater the benefits from an educational viewpoint. This is not the case with the educational advantages of not teaching them these skills. There, we are forced to fall back on either bare assertion, the examination of grotesquely small samples, anecdotal evidence or exceedingly limited research. For instance, meta-studies of tens of thousands of children suggest strongly that there is a distinct advantage for a child in learning to read when he is young. True, some surveys indicate that this is only a short lived advantage and that it makes no difference in the long run at what age the process starts; none however suggest that being taught to read at an early age can be harmful. By contrast, there is no research at all which would lead us to suppose that there is an educational advantage in learning to read late, say at the age of eleven or twelve. It is claimed by some that this does no harm and that children quickly catch up, but nobody has ever shown that learning to read late is actually better than learning young. Nor has any research ever shown that not being taught to read is better for a child than being taught to read.

One or two well respected academics claim that children can learn to read by themselves without being taught and that this is a good thing. Such people however make in general unsubstantiated assertions. Alan Thomas has conducted work in this field. His sample was not tens of thousands of children though; it was twenty six. There is of course ample evidence to support the idea that formal education in schools should be delayed until after the age of five. Raymond and Dorothy Moore examined this idea back in the seventies and wrote the book Better late than early, which argued that formal schooling should not start before the age of twelve. A few years later they wrote Home Grown Kids, in which they decided that schools were unnecessary. In other countries, such as Sweden for example, it is thought better to dealy schooling until later than in this country. Learning to read at school when a child is five is however quite a different thing from being taught to read by a parent at the age of two or three. Research showing that early schooling is undesirable does not mean that a parent teaching a child to read at home at that age is undesirable.

I have a suspicion that most of the home educating parents who decide not to teach their children how to read and write refrain from doing so not because they have examined the evidence and concluded that this is the best strategy. Rather, it seems to me that the majority of them begin from this perspective and then cast around for books and websites which will encourage them in this belief. It could hardly be otherwise. After all, anybody looking into the subject objectively will, as I say, soon discover that teaching children to read has been the rule for thousands of years, and that there is really very little evidence that it is unnecessary. Those parents who choose not to teach reading and writing are, in effect, gambling on an untested and unproven theory. This is fine when we make a decision as adults to place our faith in a crank belief system. if I fall ill and prefer crystal healing to antibiotics, that is my affair. If I opt to use a dubious system of medicine or education upon a child though, the case is altered. Children are not able to give informed consent to becoming guinea pigs in this way.

Where our children are concerned, it is probably best to play safe and follow the most widely accepted beliefs regarding their welfare. This should apply equally to their education and medical treatment. It is curious and perhaps significant that many home educating parents who choose to follow bizarre and unsubstantiated educational doctrines, also follow strange and irrational medical ideas such as homeopathy and the dangers of vaccination. I have an idea that the explanation for this propensity to embrace unconventional and frankly outlandish belief systems would be more readily understood by a psychopathologist than the present writer, whose interests in the matter tend to be purely educational.