sabrrbas

I just today met an elderly woman who was amazed by the fact that I want to unschool. she was concerned because she recently learned how to read.
How does illiteracy happen if children read when they want?
I am puzzled by someone that cannot read I am sure they at some point in life needed or really wanted to understand something.
was she just not ready to learn until now??? I did not want to pry into her life but it is very interesting? I do not want to sound offensive if so I am sorry. Does anyone understand what I am asking?

any insight?

Vicki Dennis

It is my opinion that the huge increase in "learning disabilities",
particularly with regard to reading, happens because our culture pushes
earlier and earlier reading instruction. When children who are not
developmentally ready are labelled non-readers at age 8 after 4-5 years of
misguided instruction, many are never able to recover from the damage done.

I think that adult illiteracy can happen in much the same way.

When I say that children will read when they are ready, it is usually with
the proviso that they are in an environment where reading is enjoyed and
where they have access to written words. I think it doubtful children would
communicate verbally if there is not spoken language in their environment.
To support reading there needs to be an environment where questions about
"what is that word" are answered rather than the child shamed or ignored or
told to pay attention when in school and he would know.
Or the response that really prickles me........."sound it out".
Encouragement that they are not reading yet rather than that they have not
been taught is also helpful.

Did your acquaintance mention how she learned to read after whatever was
done to her as a child disabled her?

vicki

On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 4:11 PM, sabrrbas <sabrrbas@...> wrote:

>
>
> I just today met an elderly woman who was amazed by the fact that I want to
> unschool. she was concerned because she recently learned how to read.
> How does illiteracy happen if children read when they want?
> I am puzzled by someone that cannot read I am sure they at some point in
> life needed or really wanted to understand something.
> was she just not ready to learn until now??? I did not want to pry into her
> life but it is very interesting? I do not want to sound offensive if so I am
> sorry. Does anyone understand what I am asking?
>
> any insight?
>
>
>


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Joyce

**** How does illiteracy happen if children read when they want? ****
Because need is only half of what's necessary. The other half is a warm
supportive environment where their experiences with the printed words
are positive. If she had no support, if she was pressured or shamed to
do things before she was able (which makes some kids decide they're
stupid or that reading is stupid), if reading wasn't something fun and
interesting but something to be dreaded, it's likely she shut down when
opportunities to learn came along.
Joyce


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Sandra Dodd

I bet this has already been answered, but I'm way behind on mail.

-=-I am puzzled by someone that cannot read I am sure they at some
point in life needed or really wanted to understand something.
was she just not ready to learn until now??? I did not want to pry
into her life but it is very interesting? I do not want to sound
offensive if so I am sorry. Does anyone understand what I am asking?-=-

She might have been "ready to learn" earlier and school destroyed her
confidence that it was something she COULD learn.

In every reading class from first grade or pre-school, some of the
kids are marked (with a letter or number or phrase) as non-readers.
Once official teachers tell someone she can't read, why should she
keep trying? If looking at the printed word makes a person want to
cry, how easy would it be for her to learn to read on her own? Not
very.

It's possible that some people are unable to make any sense of visual
squiggles. They can learn from audio books then, or movies, or TV, or
going places and seeing people directly doing things and talking about
them, or learn from doing.

If a child decides he's "ready to learn" it doesn't mean he'll be able
to decipher all the things necessary to read. Parents shouldn't think
that they can teach a child to read. The most they can do is make it
easier for him to learn to read.

Sandra

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Jenny Cyphers

****It's possible that some people are unable to make any sense of visual
squiggles. They can learn from audio books then, or movies, or TV, or
going places and seeing people directly doing things and talking about
them, or learn from doing.

If a child decides he's "ready to learn" it doesn't mean he'll be able
to decipher all the things necessary to read. Parents shouldn't think
that they can teach a child to read. The most they can do is make it
easier for him to learn to read.****

I just read this article about blind people and the use of Braille and it's decline in use.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/magazine/03Braille-t.html?pagewanted=1&hpw

Here's a few excerpts:

“What we’re finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able — and illiterate,” Jim Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on Higher Education and Disability, told me. “We stopped teaching our nation’s blind children how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to learn the beauty and shape and structure of language.”

“If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your mind is limited,” Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind Access Journal, told me. “You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can’t feel or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone.”

Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally wired for print literacy. But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and literacy has been widespread for no more than a century and a half).

Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of blindness that it has assumed a kind of talismanic status.

 Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers tend to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a blind person to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.

****

I know it's not the same as a sighted person learning to read or not, but the idea of literacy and knowledge are all a part of it.

I watched Chamille hear stories for years.  I could hear in what she said and how she talked that she understood the story and the language and sentence structure long before she was able to read and write.  She had a large vocabulary from hearing the written word.  I'm pretty sure that her ability to really understand the written word would have been far less if she'd been plunked down at a desk with a tape recorder and a computer.  Where is the beauty of that, where is the learning? 

It was a fascinating article and it highlited some interesting ideas about literacy.  Braille, like other books do have a kind of talismanic status as the be all, end all, for all knowledge and literacy.  Yet, even those that are blind today that can't read Braille are doing intellectual work.  The very premise that many blind educators are making against the use of other media for knowledge gathering doesn't hold in the reality of what some of the blind people, that were referenced within the article that don't use Braille, are doing.  The governor of NY is one of those very people.

How did paper literacy get to be so much better than actual knowledge and the use of it?  Since when do we need written symbols to organize the mind?  Words don't lose their meanings when they are spoken.  I like reading and writing, I really do.  I used to feel like it was the best and only way to achieve information.  Chamille showed me differently.  I sometimes wish that I could go back to my own childhood and learn about the world anew without being forced to do so through reading.




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