Kids who can't read are traumatized by parental neglect.
Parents who send their kids off to school when they're unable to read at a basic level are condemning them to a life of failure and mediocrity.
It’s not a teacher’s job to teach a kid how to read. The parent is the first teacher. Every indicator proves that parents' abdication of this impactful responsibility - which determines whether their child fails or succeeds - is an ongoing, catastrophic macro-problem. Evidently, in an evidence-based sense, leaving it up to someone else doesn't work very well. The above link is from NIH. Illiteracy is a health issue. It’s also a national security threat. As government statistics are always half true and the real number is typically double, this means that half of America's kids aren't being read to at home and they’re not being taught how to read the right way.
4th grade seems to be an inflection point. This is when all the fretful researchers say that catching up becomes overwhelming. The oft-cited stat is that two-thirds of students who cannot read at grade level by then will end up on welfare or in prison. 80% of America's incarcerated are semi-literate.
A constitutional right to literacy isn’t going to change anything. Government attempts at redressing illiteracy aren’t new**.
A two-parent household is the prevailing predictor of success in school, but this has become a dwindling phenomenon since the federal government's war on marriage that began in the 1960s.
No matter how altruistic, a teacher with forty kids in her classroom doesn't have time for tutoring, and outside of dyslexia there shouldn't even be a need for 'literacy coaches' or reading remediation itself. Despite the earnest optimism of Head Start and other high-minded early education programs, if you’re keeping score, America’s illiteracy is appalling.
The teaching of reading as a critical life skill is as important as explaining fire, gravity, how to cross the street and how not to drown. Expecting the school system to make up for a parent's carelessness is oversimplified folly. Parents most critical of the school system cast blame on others when they themselves are at fault. Let's wake the kid up at five o'clock and put him on a bus to a school on the other side of the city to satisfy our spiteful jealousy and project our failure onto someone else.
Trauma repeats itself: poor people stay poor generation after generation because parents fail to provide their kids with basic literacy.
Gabor Mate and Alice Miller [“Sparing the parents is our supreme law”, “Murderers don't fall from the sky”] do a good job of explaining the after-effects of childhood trauma. Most human misery is rooted in child abuse and neglect. Addiction, anger, ignorance, violence, crime - ugly behavior has a predicate.
What's worse than America's kids not doing well in school and therefore not doing well in life is that they'll never experience the cleverness of Shakespeare, the perfection of Proust, the comfort of scripture, the mind-expanding imaginativity of science fiction, the scare and thrill of battle scenes, the poignancy of love stories and the firing of compassionate mirror neurons that good literature evokes. Besides illiteracy's loss of productivity, this is a massive sadness.
A child nestled in the lap of the one person in the world she completely adores, listening to the fluctuations of her parent's voice, feeling the thrum of its vibration in her little body, pointing at words and pictures, giddy from her parent's imitation of monsters, fairies, critters and goblins, sharing mindlight while her intellect is expanding at the rate of the universe, going to sleep with this dependably wonderful experience is the best way to end the day and the very best way to learn how to read, far more effective than software, parking on Sesame Street or attending Drag Queen Pedophile Hour.
How much has been wasted on apps that monitor students' reading habits, teacher programs for 'multi-dimensional learning environments', 'future-focused pedagogical approaches', 'maximizing digital resources' for 'the active classroom', and other futilities that don't get kids reading but employ overeducated academics who do little more than wring their hands and write reports about America's self-destructive illiteracy?
Nevertheless, nothing is so broken that it cannot be fixed. Illiteracy is just an engineering problem. The easiest way out is up: Overhead in Bed turns the simple act of reading upside down. Looking up subtly stimulates wonderment, playfulness and creativity. Drifting clouds, the leaves on a tree, the stars in the sky, a book in stationary free-float.
Despite all the academic analysts' apprehensive anxiety over America's illiteracy, a motivated kid can catch up, make the grade and exceed his expected reading level. It doesn't matter where his zipcode is, what his IQ is, how much money his parent[s] make or if his school has low expectations, is dis-empowering, and the teachers suck. All it takes is some unstressed interest.
Kids who are behind in reading ability are self-conscious. They're forced to feel inept and inadequate. No one can see you while you're inside the canopy of an Overhead in Bed viewing platform, its drape is an invisibility cloak. Inside this silo of solitude there is no shame, there is no stigma. If a kid has *phonics skills and the material is compelling, he'll get it eventually, at his own pace. Revelations will spark in a cognitive process that's intimate and generative. Add earplugs to eliminate noise, and it's just the kid and the book. If he falls asleep, which is very easy to do using this apparatus, maybe he needed a rest from the criticism and portentous pestering of his insecure environment.
Kids who are adept readers, 'the naturals' as they're called, put their fingers in their ears in a noisy classroom, and some place their hands at the sides of their eyes to block out the periphery.
Free your mind [from concentration-dissipating interference] and the rest will follow.
*”For quite a while, Francie had been spelling out letters, sounding them and then putting the sounds together to mean a word. But, one day, she looked at a page and the word "mouse" had instantaneous meaning. She looked at the word, and a picture of a gray mouse scampered through her mind. She looked further and when she saw "horse," she heard him pawing the ground and saw the sun glint on his glossy coat. The word "running" hit her suddenly and she breathed hard as though running herself. The barrier between the individual sound of each letter and the whole meaning of the word was removed and the printed word meant a thing at one quick glance. She read a few pages rapidly and almost became ill with excitement. She wanted to shout it out. She could read! She could read!" ~ Betty Smith, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”
**The Massachusetts School Law of 1642
[EMPHASIS ours]:
"THIS CORT, TAKING INTO CONSIDERATION THE GREAT NEGLECT OF MANY PARENTS IN TRAINING UP THEIR CHILDREN IN LEARNING & labor, & other implyments which may be proffitable to the common wealth, DO HEREUPON ORDER and decree, THAT in EUERY TOWNE ye chosen men appointed for managing the prudentiall affajres of the same SHALL HENCEFORTH STAND CHARGED WITH THE CARE OF THE REDRESSE OF THIS EVIL, SO AS THEY SHALBEE SUFFICIENTLY PUNISHED BY FINES FOR THE NEGLECT THEREOF, upon presentment of the grand iury, or other information or complaint in any Court within this iurisdiction; AND FOR THIS END THEY, or the greater number of them, SHALL HAVE POWER TO TAKE ACCOUNT from time to time of all parents and masters, and OF their CHILDREN, concerning their calling and implyment of their children, ESPECIALLY OF THEIR ABILITY TO READ & understand the principles of religion & the capitall lawes of this country, AND TO IMPOSE FINES UPON SUCH AS SHALL REFUSE TO RENDER SUCH ACCOUNTS to them when they shall be required; and they shall have power, with consent of any Court or the magistrate, to put forth apprentices the children of such as they shall (find) not to be able & fitt to employ and bring them up. They shall take … that boyes and girles be not suffered to converse together, so as may occasion any wanton, dishonest, or immodest behavior; & for their better performance of this trust committed to them, they may divide the towne amongst them, appointing to every of the said townesmen a certaine number of families to have special oversight of. THEY ARE ALSO TO PROVIDE THAT A SUFFICIENT QUANTITY OF MATERIALLS, AS HEMP, FLAXE, ecra, may be raised in their severall townes, & TOOLES & IMPLEMENTS PROVIDED FOR WORKING OUT THE SAME; & FOR THEIR ASSISTANCE IN THIS SO NEEDFULL AND BENEFICIALL IMPLOYMT, IF THEY MEETE WITH ANY DIFFICULTY OR OPPOSITION WCH THEY CANNOT WELL MASTER BY THEIR OWN POWER, THEY MAY HAVE RECORSE TO SOME OF THE MATRATS, WHO SHALL TAKE SUCH COURSE FOR THEIR HELP & INCURAGMT AS THE OCCASION SHALL REQUIRE ACCORDING TO JUSTICE; & the said townesmen, at the next Cort in those limits, after the end of their year, shall give a briefe account in writing of their proceedings herein, provided that they have bene so required by some Cort or magistrate a month at least before; & this order to continew for two yeares, & till the Cort shall take further order."
“Illiteracy is a type of social evil.” ~ Suzanne Woods Fisher, “The Moonlight School”