Researching into the acquisition of literacy

In my local newspaper this week is the story of a woman who has just celebrated her hundredth birthday. She is a lifelong smoker and attributes her longevity in part to this habit. This reminds me somewhat of those home educating parents who claim that their children did not start reading until they were fifteen and yet still went to university. The point being of course that the hundred year old woman did not live that long because of, but in spite of her smoking. There is no doubt that some home educated children do not learn to read until quite late by school standards, but whether this is a desirable state of affairs or helped contribute to their later success is debatable.

Part of the problem when discussing home educated children in this country and how and when they learned to read is that almost no research has been done on the subject. That which has been done is based upon grotesquely small, self-selected samples and the results of each such piece of research often contradict all that which has gone before. I mentioned yesterday Paula Rothermel's testing of five children using the NLS tests and this irritated somebody who commented here. Let us look at two pieces of work carried out in this country about the reading abilities of home educated children.

Writing in his book How Children learn at Home (Continuum, 2007), Alan Thomas had this to say;

'Some children did learn to read early by school standards, but many were spread out in the seven to twelve age range and a few were even older than this'

This is, I will not say the standard view in British home education, nothing is that, but it is certainly a commonly held view. The idea being that if children are not made to learn formally at the age of five or six, they might acquire literacy a little later, but are not at all disadvantaged by this. We see this opinion expressed pretty regularly. We turn now to another piece of work which indicated precisely the opposite of this. In February 1997 Paula Rothermel, a student at Durham University, sent out 2500 questionnaires to home educators belonging to Education Otherwise. The following year she sent out the same number again and a small number to Local Education Authorities and a few other places. She received over a thousand responses. This work was carried out as part of her studies and subsequently formed the subject of her PhD thesis. One claim which emerged from this work was that home educated children scored far higher on standard tests of literacy than children of similar age at school. 'Far higher' is understating the case. Using the assessments for literacy which Rothermel did, one would expect to find 16% of children in the top band. According to Rothermel, no fewer than 94% of home educated six year olds were in this band.

In other words, according to Thomas and many home educating parents, it is common for children educated at home to be a little later than school children in learning to read. Rothermel claimed however that over 90% of the children she tested were doing brilliantly at reading at a very early age. It has not been possible to replicate these results; a fatal flaw in any sort of research.

Interestingly, a lot of the research in this field is carried out by students. The Otago work from New Zealand was by a student, as was the work on the sixteen pupils at Sudbury Valley which I discussed yesterday. Paula Rothermel's work too was that of a student. It would be very good to see a properly designed survey carried out of a large group of home educated children in this country, looking at the methods used and the long term results; ie, after the age of sixteen. Until this is done, we must really keep an open mind on the matter; the evidence so far being scrappy and unreliable.

Teach and forget; a common strategy for parents

I want to look today at what motives parents might have for teaching their children systematically and then forgetting that they have done such a thing; in effect, airbrushing this from their family history. This is by no means uncommon among both home educating parents and also those who send their children to school. Some motives for this are restricted to home educators and so I shall deal with these first.

Quite a few home educating parents seem to feel almost ashamed to be seen to be pushing their children academically and those who do ensure that the children study literacy and mathematics in a structured and traditional way often conceal this from other parents. I want to think about this first and see if we can discover what could be responsible for this extraordinary state of affairs; educators who seem to be embarrassed about educating! There are several reasons why home educating parents might behave in this way. Before we go any further, I want to make it quite clear that I do not want to become bogged down in terminology here. I am talking about parents who teach their children and then keep quiet about it afterwards or try to erase it from their minds. I do not mind whether we call this coercive education and contrast it with autonomous, or whether we talk of imposed teaching and compare it with unschooling or informal education. The fact is, that parents do it.

Many, but not of course all, home educating groups are ambivalent about teaching and imposing discipline upon children. I have heard from parents who say that when they have said 'No' to their child at a group, they are stared at as though they are child abusers. One mother mentioned that her eight year-old son would be studying for GCSEs when he was older and the reaction was very hostile. How could she possibly know that he would do this? Wasn't she being presumptuous? Did she not want to give the boy a choice when he was older? I think that quite a few readers will know what I am talking about here. Under these circumstances, there is a tendency to adapt to the mores of the group and keep quiet about anything that might smack of 'school at home'. There is also, incidentally, a tendency to pretend that one does not permit visits from the local authority, this being another of those things that many parents are expected to give lip service to. People who accept visits are sometimes made to feel as though they are letting the side down. One sees this attitude a lot on Internet lists. The family who I mentioned yesterday, for example, claimed in the newspaper to be unknown to the council and said that if registration became compulsory they would leave the country. In fact, just as with many other autonomous educators, they enjoy a perfectly amicable relationship with their local HE advisor from the council. This is also common; quite a few parents have visits from their local authority and then keep quiet about it for fear of being thought Quislings!

Conforming to the expectations of a group in order not to be rejected is one reason for maintaining these pretences, but there are other motives at work. Saying, 'We're autonomous' is a bit of a catchphrase in some circles. It makes one sound 'with it'. It's a bit like saying 'We're organic'. It is a shorthand code for a lifestyle rather than merely an educational philosophy. There was of course also the enjoyment during the campaign against the Badman review and Schedule 1 of the Children, Schools and Families Bill of pretending to be part of a persecuted minority. For a while, some of these parents could make out that they would be forced to flee the country or go on the run like desperate criminals! This was the only chance some of these families would ever have to feel like members of a despised minority and it would have been foolish to pass it up. Of course one had to be an autonomous educator to be part of this. Structured educators who were registered with their local authority could not make out that they were threatened by the proposed new law and so many parents denied that they had visits and let everybody think that they too felt that the new law would stop them home educating. This particular game encouraged many home educating parents to pose as being autonomous.


Perhaps the strongest motive for teaching one's child and then forgetting that one has done so is this. People tend to sneer a little at pushy parents and those who appear over anxious for their child to succeed. Let's face it; it looks a bit sad to be so desperate for your child to do better than everybody else's! It is much cooler to pretend that your kid does not have to work hard and that you certainly don't have to put the hours in on their education. When GCSEs were are taking place, every single one of our friends would claim that their children were doing no revision and that it was confidently expected that they would do badly at their exams. This was despite the fact that many of these kids had had private tutors for years and the parents were insisting that they stay in and study practically every night. (To say nothing of completing their coursework for them!) When their children achieved a string of As and A*s, it made it look as though the kids were little geniuses who had managed this without trying. The same thing happens when people teach their children things like reading and mathematics. If they then forget about this, then it looks as though their child must be super bright for being able to learn the thing later without any formal instruction. I must admit that I was tempted to do this myself. Had I kept quiet about all the teaching which I did, then I could have made out that my daughter had 'just picked up' literacy, the four basic arithmetical operations and everything else up to and including calculus. This would have had the double pay-off both of making me appear a laid back and right-on parent and also presenting my child as a real brain-box!

I have to say that there is often no conscious deception involved in this process by the parents. Some of our friends seemed genuinely to have forgotten the years of tutoring, the extra-curricular activities and so on. They honestly seemed to believe that their children's GCSE results were entirely their kid's doing. I am sure that the same thing happens with home educators who spend time teaching their children. If I had my time over again, I might well be inclined to erase all the intensive work with flashcards from my memory and allow my daughter the credit for simply picking up reading of her own accord.

Autonomous learning and the growth of aliteracy

The idea that children might learn to read of their own accord, by osmosis as it were, was memorably described by David Bell, Chief Inspector of Schools in 2004, as being , "Plain crackers". This is pretty much the standard view among modern educationalists and the whole thrust in the teaching of reading in schools today is intensive work in synthetic phonics from a very early age; the aim being of course, to eradicate illiteracy. This is a laudable enough intention, to be sure, but it is beginning to look to some as though this determination to rid us of illiteracy has left the way open for the rise of a new problem; huge numbers of aliterate adults.

Aliterate people are those who, while capable of reading, choose not to do so. A survey in the USA a little while ago revealed that the modal number of books read by the average person in the previous year was zero! In other words, in answer to the question, "How many books did you read last year?", the commonest answer given was, "None". Where America leads, we follow, and it is quite acceptable and common these days for adults to say, " I don't read books". Even well known individuals like footballers and pop stars will say quite openly that they don't read books.

The teaching of reading in schools may well be efficient, but it is also desperately dull. Reading is treated as another sterile academic skill which the child must be pushed into acquiring in the shortest possible time. Little wonder that for many children reading is about attractive and pleasurable as reciting the multiplication tables! Inevitably, this means that many children would not dream of reading a book outside school, unless is was necessary. This attitude becomes fixed for many well before they leave primary school. In secondary school, the only books many of them will encounter are the novels that they are made to read for GCSE. Of course in many cases, they will not have to read the entire book, only selected chapters. Novels are thus reduced to a means, rather than an end in themselves. Just try suggesting to a fifteen year old boy who is studying for GCSEs that he might enjoy another book by the same author. If he is doing "Pride and Prejudice", ask if he has read "Emma". he will look at you as though you have taken leave of your sense! Why would he possibly wish to read a book upon which he would not be tested?

The relentless drilling in phonics and the perception that novels are only useful in that they will enable one to pass an examination, both rob reading of any attraction as an end in itself. It has been imposed upon the child from without and against his will. As soon as the compulsion ends, he will stop doing it almost as a matter of course. It is possible that when a child is left to her own devices to acquire the skill in her own time, the outcome might be very different. Things that we choose to do for our own satisfaction are generally things that we will do again and again if we find them enjoyable. this is in contrast to those things we are compelled to do. Even if the thing which we have been made to do is fun, the element of compulsion cannot help but remove some of its pleasure. Perhaps this accounts for the fact that while reading books for pleasure seems to be increasingly rare among schoolchildren, anecdotal evidence from the parents of autonomously educated children suggests that once they do take to the thing, they read a great deal for the sake of it.

There is something fundamentally unsound about any educational system which turns the reading of books into a chore. Any method of tuition or lack of tuition which makes it more likely that young people will pick up a book without prompting from an adult is to be commended. It would be interesting to conduct a large survey among schooled and autonomously educated children and see whether or not their attitudes to reading and books really are as different as personal observation suggests.