Learning to read and write

Leave them kids alone

Children learn a lot about things they take interest in, and very little about things they do not take interest in. This is a simple truth, yet a widely ignored or misunderstood one. Kids will develop various interests as they grow, and these may last for different lengths of time. They should be allowed to pursue whatever their personality leads them to, so long as it is not harmful. Each child goes through a unique and individual course of development. For each child there is a natural and proper time for engaging in various projects and activities, and each child is uniquely positioned to know best when that time arrives. It is very important not to interfere with this delicate process.

Trying to direct the course of children's intellectual development is harmful in several ways. First, it may cause the child to develop a dislike for things they may have otherwise come to like in due course, and this would be regrettable. Second, they will spend much more mental energy and reap much smaller gains when they are not mentally ripe for what is pushed their way. What would be naturally acquired in a breeze and with much joy and enthusiasm if allowed to happen naturally becomes an arduous and frustrating task that drags on for lengthy periods of time with little durable results. But perhaps most importantly, things that are pushed too early on (or too late), and are done unwillingly, are going to be associated in the mind of the child, often for life, with unpleasant emotional complex. This often results in various learning obstacles and difficulties which may be very difficult to get rid of.

Children will learn how to read and write in the same way they naturally learn how to talk if the process is allowed to take place at times and rates chosen by the child without interference. The claim that these skills will not be acquired without schooling is a myth that schools are happy to propagate. It is truly remarkable that a multi-billion dollar industry is based on a negation of this fact. The actual truth is almost the opposite. Many of the learning difficulties that children develop are a result of the misguided efforts to teach children these tasks under a rigid and misguided regime. It’s a mistake to teach reading and writing in the same way that it would be a terrible mistake to try to teach speaking. Reading and writing are so much an integral part of today's world that children will sooner or later learn them on their own, without even being aware of it (which is the best way to learn anything), and in a very gradual, smooth and effortless way. The same way they learn how to speak.

At what point this is going to happen very much depends on the individual, but as a rule, the less we pay attention to it the quicker and earlier it will happen. Not that being early and quick is necessarily a good thing. No matter when the process starts, the end result will be very much the same. The child will end up as proficient as someone who did it five years earlier, only with the added advantage of having no psychological complexes attached to it. Forcing our own agenda on the child not only unnecessarily and harmfully introduces these psychological complexes to what otherwise would be a completely natural process; they also divert precious mental energy from what the child is really interested in at that point.

As is the case with speaking, we should stay totally out of the business of correcting the child, unless explicitly asked by the child to do so, and even then we should do it only only reluctantly. We tend to look at mistakes in the wrong light. Sometimes they are just a different way of doing things, and not necessarily worse than the conventional way. There is always some logic, some reasoning, behind a mistake. Before we blindly venture to correct we need to understand this reasoning. This can teach us a lot. This process of reasoning in itself is very valuable and should not be discouraged. Mistakes are often very creative, and we should pay more attention to that aspect of them. We should not put conformity as the aim. Children have a strong urge to conform in any case, and it will happen anyhow. But creativity is more precious and more easily stifled and destroyed. It is very often in the mistakes that this creativity expresses itself.

Mistakes are a very important part of the process of learning. Not being afraid to make mistakes is absolutely essential for learning. The natural response of children to mistakes, before we interject, is usually laughter (if we could only do the same), until we teach them otherwise. Here as well, in our misguided attitudes we introduce unnecessary emotional complexes that are going to be a hindrance to future learning and creativity, and which are going to be extremely difficult to get rid of.

Spelling is a good example. The reason why the spelling of words is so different from the way they sound is that the spoken language was allowed to develop and change, largely because we haven’t found yet an effective way to control it. Unfortunately this is no longer the case with written language. Unlike the spoken language, it was at one point decided that there is only one correct way of spelling, and this was decided long enough ago to make present spelling completely out of sync with the freely changing spoken one. Had we allowed written language to develop and change in the same way that we are forced to allow our spoken language, we may have ended with a much more vibrant and creative spelling, similar to what we find in spoken language. In all probability we would have also ended up with different dialects of spelling. We tolerate this with spoken language, so why shouldn’t we tolerate it with the written one? Diversity and creativity, which usually go hand in hand, ought to be celebrated rather than stifled.

These days we get a glimpse of this potential creativity with the new spelling which is constantly invented by the young generation in electronic conversations. Here we suddenly find written language used enthusiastically and creatively in one of the mediums where we have not managed to impose some useless rules. As a matter of fact, at the height of creativity of the English language (which may be as rich as it is precisely because it was open to innovation and change), in Shakespearian times, there was no canonical, no correct way of spelling. Thus we find generations and generations of children having to perpetually undergo a useless and harmful process of adapting their spontaneous and creative spelling to a completely illogical and out of date one, and all in the name of education.