That is, they need to spend their time “learning to read” before “reading to learn.” Science can wait history, which is considered too abstract for young minds to grasp, must wait. In the meantime, what children are reading doesn’t really matter-it’s better for them to acquire skills that will enable them to discover knowledge for themselves later on than for them to be given information directly, or so the thinking goes. In elementary-school classrooms, the time spent on social studies and science has plummeted. Use simple texts to teach children how to find the main idea, make inferences, draw conclusions, and so on, and eventually they’ll be able to apply those skills to grasp the meaning of anything put in front of them. American elementary education has been shaped by a theory that goes like this: Reading-a term used to mean not just matching letters to sounds but also comprehension-can be taught in a manner completely disconnected from content. That girl’s assignment was merely one example, albeit an egregious one, of a standard pedagogical approach. More to the point, she had never heard of Brazil and was unable to read the word. But she was unaware that the text was there until I turned it over. She was supposed to be making inferences and drawing conclusions about a dense article describing Brazil, which was lying facedown on her desk. The girl was pointing to the phrase draw conclusions. Running down the left side of the worksheet was a list of reading-comprehension skills: finding the main idea, making inferences, making predictions. “Because it says right here, ‘Draw clowns,’ ” she explained. ![]() ![]() I knelt next to her and asked, “What are you drawing?” Ten minutes later, she had sketched a string of human figures, and was busy coloring them yellow. The teacher sat at a desk in the corner, going over student work, while the first graders quietly filled out a worksheet intended to develop their reading skills.Īs I looked around, I noticed a small girl drawing on a piece of paper. A t first glance, the classroom I was visiting at a high-poverty school in Washington, D.C., seemed like a model of industriousness.
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