The spontaneous acquisition of literacy

The idea has been advanced lately, in the comments on this blog,  that if education were not compulsory and also that if children did not go to school, then they would still learn to read and write.  It is suggested that this would be a natural process, a by-product if you like, of living in a literate society. Mention is made of libraries, travel and the internet as means by which literacy would be acquired more or less automatically; perhaps with a little gentle encouragement from parents. This is all so fantastic, that I hardly know where to begin!

I think that part of the problem here is that some of those who comment on this blog simply don’t know how millions of children in this country live. These well-meaning people are so used to living in and visiting  homes filled with books, newspapers and magazines, environments which are overflowing with print, places where adults read and talk about books; that they cannot imagine the linguistically impoverished  backgrounds of the children living in some parts of the country. Learn to read spontaneously? These children don’t really learn to speak, until they start nursery!

Although I am working currently in a school, for many years I used to do home visiting in various capacities. I can tell readers now that an awful lot of children live in homes where there is literally no printed matter. Until they start school, they never see anybody read anything at all. Their homes are filled with flickering screens of various types; four or five televisions, games consoles, DVD players  and computers. Reading is not part of their lives in any way at all. They hear almost no conversation.  Somebody talked of travel yesterday, as though that were also the sort of thing which would stimulate and encourage literacy. I could introduce readers to  five year-old children in east London who have literally never been more than a mile and a half from their home. Their lives are as restricted as medieval peasants. These are children who have never travelled the few miles to central London, never been on a train, never visited a library. On a school trip with a group of seven year-olds from Hackney, I saw children panicking, because they had never seen an escalator before! They were terrified at this strange metal object which threatened to carry them down under ground and we had to take some of them down the fixed stairs. I am not talking here of a few pathological or atypical cases; this sort of life is common on some of the housing estates that I know.

School is a beacon of hope for these children. It is the only hope that they will ever have for being stimulated, for learning, for discovering anything beyond their immediate existence. These kids find it hard enough to learn to read and write as it is. The notion that they would achieve this without school is utterly grotesque.

This is not to say that it is impossible for children to learn to read without direct instruction. Those who see their parents reading a newspaper every day and become curious as to what is going on, those whose parents point out words regularly, saying things like, ‘This sign  says exit’ and so  on, the ones whose homes are filled with books and other reading matter; these children will be primed to acquire literacy. These are the children whose lives are probably enriched by visits to museums and zoos, those whose parents talk to them all the time and set up activities for them. I don’t personally think this the best way for a child to learn reading and writing, but it certainly happens. There is then a tendency for the parents of such children to say; ’I didn’t teach my child to read and now he is applying for Oxford. That must mean that nobody’s children need to be taught to read.’  This is a grave error and I shall have more to say about it in future posts. We are, incidentally, approaching now the crux of the matter; the main anxiety of local authorities when it comes to home education.

The prevalence of home education in the UK

I am always amused to see home educators either exaggerating or minimising their numbers; depending upon whom they are talking to and what they wish to prove. Sometimes, they want to be thought of as an unstoppable, mass movement. Then again, there are occasions when they would sooner be seen as a tiny and insignificant fraction of the  population.  I have noticed that this is the case lately  when I am talking about the concerns of local authorities; everybody is falling over themselves to tell me that there are so few home educators that they and their children are hardly worth worrying about! Home educated children who might not be up to scratch academically  were described here yesterday as being:

some negligible minority - a small fraction of home educators who are, themselves. a small fraction of the population

This is very interesting. The problem is that nobody really knows how many children in this country are not attending school. Most experts believe that universal literacy in this country was attained by making sure that almost every child was in school.  The fear is that if a significant proportion were, as was the case during the nineteenth century, to be out of school, then things like illiteracy would begin to rise.

So readers are right in one sense; if the numbers of children who are not at school are indeed tiny, then this will hardly affect the country's  literacy rate or academic achievement in general. However, some researchers who are widely respected in the world of home education are making increasingly extravagant claims about the scale of the phenomenon. Paula Rothermel, for instance, is currently saying that she believes that the number of children in this country  aged between five and sixteen who are not at school  now runs into the hundreds of thousands. She claims to have identified between 300,000 and 500,000 such children. Yes, you did read that correctly; that's half a million children who are not at school.  If this were to be true, then of course local authorities might well have cause for concern.

A little about the acquisition of literacy

Just to remind readers, I am at the moment trying to see why local authorities are so keen on children attending school and why they are made uneasy when they hear of children who are not at school. This is of obvious interest to home educators. I think that we have so far established that it is better to be literate and well-educated than not and that schools are very effective at getting across at least the rudiments of things like literacy and numeracy to practically every pupil by the age of eleven. What would happen, all else being equal, to children who were not being taught at school?

So used are we to universal literacy, that it sometimes seems that acquiring the ability to read and write must be a natural process; a little like walking and talking. In other words, you don’t really need any formal instruction, because children are likely to pick it up more or less by themselves. This is certainly the view of many important ideologues in the world of American home education. As long ago as 1962, Paul Goodman, author of Compulsory Miseducation, said:

the puzzle is not how to teach reading, but why some children fail to learn to read. Given the amount of exposure that any urban child gets, any normal animal should spontaneously catch on to the code. What prevents? It is almost demonstrable that, for many children, it is precisely going to school that prevents - because of the school's alien style, banning of spontaneous interest, extrinsic rewards and punishments

So in this version of reality, literacy is not caused by schools at all, but they actually hinder its acquisition. Could this be true? Could universal literacy really be attained without schools? Fortunately, we have a fairly simply way of checking on claims of this sort.

Because literacy is taken for granted today, most of us have never met an illiterate adult. By this, I mean a man or woman who cannot read or write at all. My Uncle Eddie was one of these people. He was a Gypsy who had never attended school and he could not even write his own name. He used to sign for his wages by making a cross. This was rare in the 1960s, but  quite common in nineteenth century England.

Here is the sort of urban environment which people like Paul Goodman think can allow a child to catch on spontaneously to reading:

This is London in the 1830s and there is plenty of print on display. You would think that children who didn’t go to school would see all this and learn to read by themselves. Looking now at marriage registers for 1840, we find that a third of men and half of all women, were signing the marriage register  with a scrawled mark, such as a cross. In other words, they were unable even to write their own names. By 1900, 97% of both men and women were able to sign their names on the marriage register. I am not being dogmatic about this, but it seems to me likely that the introduction of compulsory education, which in effect meant almost universal schooling, was responsible for this eradication  of illiteracy. Had those couples signing the register  not attended school; they would have remained illiterate. I am of course open to another explanation for this, if readers wish to offer one.

In other words, sending nearly every child in the country to school, from 1870 onwards,  had the effect of giving them the ability to read and write. This was a good thing. Today, the universal literacy which we see in this country is maintained by that same,  almost universal custom of sending children to school. We know it works; the results speak for themselves; when did readers last meet somebody who could not sign his or her name? 

This then is a problem facing local authorities. Like every other sensible person in the kingdom, they think it good that everybody can read, write and carry out basic arithmetical operations. They know that this happy situation has been brought about by compulsory education and almost universal schooling. They do not know whether the tens of thousands of children who are not at school are also being taught to read, write, perform arithmetic and so on. It is an unknown.  Some of them are; others are not. I think that this is as much as we have time for today and in the next few days, we will see what, if anything, local authorities should do about this state of affairs.

Why are local authorities pursuing home educators when their own schools are in such a terrible state?

A few days ago, we began to look at the question of why local authorities chase home educating parents and seem so keen that all children should be at school. We agreed, I think, that there are many advantages to being literate and well educated and no discernible drawbacks.  Now it is of course perfectly possible for a child to be educated adequately, other than at school. Never the less, school is the best and cheapest way of educating millions of children to a certain standard. 

Before we explore the subject of local authorities wanting almost every child to attend school, I want to look at the one objection which is always raised by home educating parents whenever I touch upon this. Somebody is sure to say, 'Why don't the local authorities fix the school system, before they start worrying about home educated children?  These schools are so dreadful that a fifth of the teenagers leaving school are illiterate! If over 20% of children can go through school for eleven years without learning to read and write, surely there is something wrong with the system of mass education?' This figure of one child in five being unable to read and write is of course quite absurd, but is widely believed by home educators. Let's look at the real situation.

I am currently working a dreadful primary school, where around half the children are entitled to free school dinners. It caters for a very deprived area and the children do not have, on the whole, stimulating homes where parents take an active interest in their education. Yet here's a very interesting thing. Every single child in Year 4 can read and write. I know this, because I have tested them myself; getting them to read from a newspaper,  watching them write and so on. Remember, this is not some highly sought after school in a good district; quite the opposite. The current methods used to teach reading are  astonishingly successful. By the use of synthetic phonics, practically any child can learn to read by the age of seven.

So far, so good. Every eight and nine year old can read and write, yet by the time that they leave school, will a fifth of them have lost these vital skills? Not at all; they will be far better at both reading and writing by the age of sixteen. 

At this point, I sense that some readers are either scratching their heads in bewilderment or foaming at the mouth in fury; depending upon temperament.  Hasn't government research confirmed this finding that rates of illiteracy are rising? Surely the schools can't be working very well? The explanation is very simple. The definition which I use for literacy is the one which was universal until a  few years ago. Literacy was regarded as, 'the ability to read and write a simple note'. In other words, if you could write your friend a message, saying perhaps, 'See you at the pub tonight Jim, at nine' and he could read this; then you were both literate. This is probably the meaning of literacy which most of us still subscribe to. It means being able to read and write in this way.  Using that definition, every school leaver in the United Kingdom, with one or two rare exceptions, is literate. The literacy rate in this country is effectively 100%. However, this is not the definition of literacy which is now in use. The new definition depends upon what we call 'document literacy'; which  means the ability to decode and make sense of rather more complicated written material than a simple note. Reading a train timetable, for example, is one of the measures. Now I am pretty sure that I am not illiterate, but I certainly get in a muddle when looking at timetables of that sort and so do many people.  Reading a map is another instance of 'document literacy'. Again, many well-read and literate people have trouble with map reading.

If I were to  test Year 4 next week, by looking at their ability to read maps or fathom out train timetables, then the literacy rate would plummet from 100% to 0% over the course of the weekend!

Although I am not a fan of schools and the way that they do things, there is no doubt that they do what they set out to do very well. Every child receives an education, all are able to read, write and perform the four basic arithmetical operations by the time that they leave primary school. I might not like the methods, but they work.  In other words, local authorities know that if a child is in school, then he or she is receiving an education. They do not know this about children who are not in school and this is where the problem begins. Next week, we shall look at some of their concerns and how these might be addressed.

An odd omission

Many home educating parents in this country say that they  value such qualities in their children as creativity, compassion, altruism and curiosity at least as much as they do academic achievement. This is a perfectly reasonable position to take. At the same time, it is asserted that in addition to these immeasurable qualities, children educated at home do actually do better academically; reading earlier and so on. The source  for such claims, at least when made in Britain,  is almost invariably the work of Paula Rothermel. As many readers will know, in 1998 Paula Rothermel administered Performance Indicators in Primary Schools  or PIPS assessments to  35 home educated children and conducted literacy tests on some others. The results were astonishing, showing the home educated children to be greatly in advance of their schooled peers. So far, so good and these results are still quoted whenever the subject of academic achievement among home educated children in this country is raised. Nobody seems to have noticed a very curious omission.

At a conference this year, held in August, Paula Rothermel  presented a paper entitled, ‘Home-Education: The Cognitive Leap at 4-5 years: comparative research from school and home educated children’  Here it is:

http://www.homeschoolconference.com/forum/topics/presentation-homeschooling-uk-comparision-of-4-5-year-olds-in-and?xg_source=activity

This is an account of those same 35 children that were tested using PIPS in 1998. In fact, for the last 15 years, Dr Rothermel has always  quoted this same, exceedingly small piece of research. Never has an academic career been founded upon more slender and insubstantial material; 35 children, 15 years ago!  However, what I have been wondering lately is this. Rothermel knew all those children personally. She visited their homes, made friends with their parents and was enormously popular with the home educating families. Having found such outstanding academic ability in a cohort of home educated children, surely here is a rich vein to be mined? Instead of harping on, 15 years later about those same tests conducted in 1998, one would have expected to see some sort of follow-up. After all, those children must be nearly 20 by now. How are they doing?  Did their early academic success continue? Are they at university or working? Are any of them unemployed? What sort of GCSE results did they get?  Remember, these were being touted as academically gifted children, with brilliant prospects. In terms of literacy alone, Rothermel found that 94% of the 6 year-olds were in the top band, whereas in schools, one would expect this to be only 16%. These were astounding figures.

Just to make myself clear; here are families who volunteered to have their children tested academically, with startlingly good results. Paula Rothermel knew these people personally, had visited their homes, had their addresses and telephone numbers and so on. Has she never asked herself or indeed their parents, how these children got in in later years? I am sure that she must have done and yet there has been no further news about them. Of course, when she is attending conferences in Bogota or Barcelona,  all this might be new to them and they may not notice just how elderly these data are becoming,  but in academic circles in this country, the endless recycling of these same figures has become a topic of amusement over the years. Am I the only person in the home educating world who has noticed this, or asked himself what actually became of those shining and academically advanced children?

The autonomous acquisition of literacy in home educated children

One of the most commonly held beliefs among  certain  British home educators  is that it is unnecessary to teach children to read; that they will somehow just ‘pick it up’ naturally, just like walking and talking. I don’t claim that this is impossible, but I can certainly say that in every such case that I have been able to investigate, there is more to the business than at first meets the eye. I want today to look at a classic example of this sort of thing. 

     Here is an item from a local newspaper in Cambridgeshire;

http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Cambridge/Are-home-educated-children-better-off.htm

Now let us examine what is said here about the way that this child  supposedly learned to read. This is, according to the parents, an autonomous education.  We are told  that:

‘Kit was not forced to read, but instead started to pick it up when he realised it would be useful for him to learn about other things.’

We also read that;

‘he didn't want to start learning to read until he was six, and has rejected the system of phonics which is used in many schools.’


This is  fairly typical of the  kind of claims made by autonomous home educators about the learning of reading. According to this account, at the age of six this boy started to pick up reading because he realised that it would be useful. He was not forced to learn and had no dealings with phonics; that is to say learning the sounds of individual letters.

Really, if it is this easy, you wonder that anybody bothers teaching children to read at all! Why not just let them pick it up naturally like this, in their own time?  All that work in schools on teaching phonics to five and six year-olds and here is a kid who begins to read at the same age as most schoolchildren,  without any fuss; he just learns  by himself when he is ready. A  classic case of the autonomous acquisition of literacy. Except of course, it is all complete nonsense. I happen to know this for a fact. Here is what the child’s mother wrote six years before that newspaper report:

22 December 2003
…has been having a wonderful time of late learning things like numbers and letters. He was transfixed by the Sesame Street DVDs on the subjects, but was restless when I tried to do some alphabet with him today. I wrote letters in his sketchbook and he furiously scribbled them out. We came into the computer room and fired up nickjr.co.uk, which has some lovely games for 2 year olds, in case you never knew. When he knew the very same set of letters in the very same order as Mummy, suddenly it started clicking. Mummy was NOT making this up to be cruel. This is some secret code he needs to learn. As in he thinks he needs to learn it now, not just Mummy thinks he needs to learn it. He's not expert at mouse moving yet, and clicks tend to happen not at all or 30 in a row, but he likes to point to the screen and make choices and have me click on them for him. Today's winners seem to be the letter K and the letter Z. He's always been a big fan of S. 

That entry was made when the child was two years and three months of age and as we can see, one of the parents has already begun teaching her son to read. The method that she is using is of course phonics; teaching her son the letters of the alphabet and the sounds that they make. A month later, in January 2004, when the boy was two years and four months, his mother was using flashcards of letters and numbers to teach him. A month after that, her efforts began to pay off, because by February 3rd 2004, the child could recognise every single letter of the alphabet and the associated sounds. Not bad for a boy who is still only two years and five months old.

Now there is nothing at all wrong with any of this; I did exactly the same with my own daughter. It is called teaching a child to read and, just like me, this parent thought that the earlier that you undertake the process, the better. Let us now look at that newspaper report again;

‘he didn't want to start learning to read until he was six…started to pick it up when he realised it would be useful for him to learn about other things’

At best, this is exceedingly misleading; at worst, a complete falsehood. He was being  taught to read  systematically four years before he was six, by phonics; the same method used in schools. Anybody think that this might have some bearing on his acquisition of literacy?

Tomorrow, we shall be thinking a little   about this sort of deception. What motivates home educating parents to teach children to read and then pretend that their children have learned to read without any structured teaching? It is common enough and I know of many  such cases. We shall look at why people do this and also consider the ill effects that accounts of such supposedly autonomous learning can have  upon gullible parents who are persuaded that if their children are left to their own devices, then they too will somehow just ‘pick up’ the ability to read.

How the autonomous acquisition of literacy in this country relies upon universal schooling

I drew attention a few days ago to the fact that in countries where there is not universal schooling, literacy rates tend to be low. Somebody commenting here then said that the autonomous acquisition of literacy as practiced by some parents in this country is predicated upon children growing up in a literate environment; surrounded by the printed word. Others have made this point; among them Paul Goodman, John Holt and Alan Thomas. Reference has been made to the ‘sea of literacy’ which envelops children in Britain and America, allegedly making it easy for them simply to pick up literacy informally. Not one of those advocating this way of learning to read seems to have considered the implications of such a state of affairs.


At one time in this country, few people could read. Shops had signs consisting of recognisable objects rather than words. The three golden balls for the pawnbroker and the red and white barber’s pole are relics of this; as are the painted images on pub signs. As more children attended school, so the literacy rate rose. Once schooling was all but universal, the literacy rate grew to around 100%. This means that there is printed matter wherever we look. Free newspaper and advertisements are quite literally thrust upon us, being pushed through our letterboxes. It would be hard to avoid seeing printed words each day. In a country like Bangladesh, where fewer than 50% of children go to school for five years or more, the literacy rate is below 50%. It is growing though. As the rates of schooling increase, so too does the literacy rate. There is a direct and strong correlation between the move to universal schooling and the achievement of 100% literacy in a country.

What this means is that parents in this country who choose not to send their children to school and allow them to acquire literacy informally by immersing themselves in the ‘sea of literacy’ are benefiting from universal schooling just as much as those who do send their kids to school. They are riding on the back of compulsory schooling. The universal schooling produces the literate society which is needed for the autonomous acquisition of literacy. It is rather like vaccination. When vaccination levels for measles are almost universal, the disease becomes very rare. When the levels of vaccination fall, the result is a measles epidemic. This does not of course mean that one child who is not vaccinated will get measles; merely that he still benefits from the protection afforded by all those who have been vaccinated.

It is common for autonomously educating parents to moan about the efforts made by local authorities to ensure that all children attend school. This is a little ungracious, because without universal schooling of the kind we have in this country, there would be no literate society, no ‘sea of literacy’. Their own method, that of letting their children acquire literacy informally from observing the world around them, would then be impossible. Autonomous educators actually need schools at which almost 100% of children are taught, in order  to create the correct environment for their own children to learn effectively.

The informal acquisition of literacy

It is more or less an article of faith among many home educators that the teaching of reading is unnecessary; children can be expected to pick this skill up for themselves in the right circumstances. In support of this contention, some quote Alan Thomas who carried out research on what he described as the 'informal curriculum'. He said:

'Modern life takes place within a vast sea of written material which surrounds us.... Words are literally everywhere: children are surrounded by advertisements, streets signs...shopping lists, instructions, magazines, bus destinations'

The implication is that reading can be learned with little or no formal instruction; a view which some home educators enthusiastically embrace. Nor is Alan Thomas alone in this belief. As long ago as 1962, Paul Goodman was writing in Compulsory Miseducation that:

' the puzzle is not how to teach reading, but why some children fail to learn to read. given the amount of exposure any urban child gets, any normal animal should catch on to the code'

He goes on to blame schools for reading difficulties and suggests that:

'Many of the backward readers might have had a better chance on the streets'


All of which will be music to the ears of autonomous home educators. There are two points to consider. Firstly, most educationalists believe this to be nonsense. With the exception of the odd piece of research such as Thomas' and the occasional study from an advocate of Steiner in New Zealand, almost everyone thinks that it is necessary and desirable to teach children to read and the earlier the better. Still, what about Alan Thomas' and Paul Goodman's ideas? Could there really be something in this? This brings us neatly to my second point. If it is true that just the experience of living among advertisements, street signs and so on can be enough to get a child going on the road to literacy, then we should see this in other parts of the world. Thomas looked at a handful of kids in England, Ireland and Australia, while Goodman was talking exclusively about America. Surely this informal acquisition of literacy should be widespread wherever children are not in school from the age of five until sixteen?

The literacy rate in London is about 99%. I am not talking here of Ofsted measures at the age of eleven or those getting a C in GCSE English. Instead, I am using the old way of defining literacy; the ability to read or write a simple note. Much was made in the press recently about the number of children leaving primary school with a reading age of seven, but this is perfectly adequate for day to day needs. Our most popular newspaper is specifically designed to be accessible to those with a reading age of seven. It is extraordinarily rare to encounter anybody without moderate to severe learning difficulties in this country who cannot write a simple note or read a passage from the Sun. The official rate is in any case 99%. According to some though, many of these people became literate in spite of rather than because of their schooling. How can we check this?. Easily enough as it happens.

The literacy rate in Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh is just under 50%, which is far higher than rural parts of the country. Here are people who live and work surrounded by all the print that Thomas talks of; the advertisements, street signs, destinations on the front of buses and so on and yet half of them seem stubbornly resistant to acquiring literacy! This is odd. Surely, if Western children can 'catch the code' just by living in a city, then Bengali kids should be able to do the same? Let's see what might account for any difference. Both Bangladesh and England use alphabetic systems, so that is the same. London and Dhaka both have masses of print of all sorts on display in the form of advertisements, bus destinations, street signs and so on; the 'vast sea of written material' which Thomas talks of. That can't be the difference. Oh wait a minute, I think I might have it! In England all but a tiny handful of children attend school between the ages of five and sixteen. Compulsory education, which for almost everybody means compulsory schooling has been a feature of life her for well over a century. In Bangladesh on the other hand, the situation is very different. The overall literacy rate is about 35%. Roughly 40% of children never go to school, only 7% complete secondary school. Here perhaps is a clue.

In one country with near universal compulsory school attendance for eleven years of their lives, there is almost universal literacy. In a country where almost half the children never attend school and only 7% complete secondary school, 65% of the population are illiterate. Puzzling, no? I am surprised that instead of investigating a small group of children in England or America, nobody had thought to look closely at how the 'informal curriculum' works in places like Bangladesh. I think that we could learn something very interesting about the connection between compulsory schooling and literacy rates. Looking at other countries makes the situation very clear. The more children attending school; the higher the literacy rate. Near universal schooling means near universal literacy.