Why Johnny Can't Read

Resolute Ignorance

New Zealand schools are failing.  The sad thing is that it is not going to change in a hurry.  In focus at the moment is reading and writing.  According to a NZ Herald Editorial,

The news that our children's reading abilities are slipping should be a wake-up call.  For the first time in 15 years, not only have we been overtaken by similar countries, but our literacy levels have actually regressed.  New Zealand dropped 10 places (to 32 out of 50 countries) in the latest international Pirls reading test for 10-year-olds — putting us below the global median.

Once again, we have a large gap between the results of the rich and poor — largely characterised by the shameful "tail" of Maori and Pacific children allowed to fall behind their Pakeha peers.  That is a trend we have known about for a long time, and done a limited amount to fix.  But the numbers also revealed something new — Pakeha children's reading skills are also falling. In fact, Pakeha literacy slid most steeply, down 13 points to an average score of 545.  [NZ Herald]

The government education system will not be able to correct this.  It is too hidebound.  It has set a course and it is not likely to backtrack.  There is too much ideological investment in the present direction.  Without humble pie being eaten in prodigious quantities, nothing will change.  Institutional inertia and vested interests will see to that.

Fables, Fantasies and Fairy Stories

What Happens When You Deprive Children of Scary Stories

Justin Taylor
July 1, 2013


Alasdair MacIntyre:

It is through hearing stories about wicked stepmothers, lost children, good but misguided kings, wolves that suckle twin boys, youngest sons who receive no inheritance but must make their own way in the world and eldest sons who waste their inheritance on riotous living and go into exile to live with the swine that children learn or mislearn both what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are. Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words.
—Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3d ed. (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), p. 216.

G. K. Chesterton:

Letter from the UK (About Education)

'Bog-Standard' Schools are Unacceptable

In New Zealand we are having an on-going debate over the relative value and importance of reading, writing and arithmetic.  There are plenty of professional educational "experts" who argue that while these subject areas are acceptable, there are plenty of other subjects.  Pupils are wired differently.  They ought not to be forced into a one-size-fits-all pedagogical box.

On the other side are plenty of people operating in the "real world" who know that if you cannot read, cannot write, and cannot do arithmetic you cannot function effectively.  These subjects are the foundational sub-stratum of all other learning. 

A similar debate is taking place in the UK.  Graham Archer, writing in The Telegraph tells us his own story of school.

Reading List for Even Older Kids

Mining Hidden Treasures

Justin Taylor has been reproducing a reading list collated by Calvary Classical School.  He has kindly imbedded links to Amazon for all the recommended titles.   The list overall naturally contains a bias towards US history; however, for other countries this can be appropriately substituted by books dealing with one's own national history.  In New Zealand, for example, William Williams Christianity Among the New Zealanders would be appropriate for Year Eight.)

There is an additional benefit from studying a list such as this.  It provides a comparative measure for reading levels and standards in our own Christian schools.

Reading List for Older Kids

Things That Make a Difference, Part II

We published a reading list recently for children in the first three years of schooling.  It was cribbed from Calvary Classical School, courtesy of Justin Taylor.

Now, a second instalment--this time for Years Four & Five.

Reading Lists for Kids

Things That Make a Difference

Arguably the most potent contribution parents can make to the education of their younger children is to read to them.  For the first eight years of schooling, reading to children every day is far, far more important than homework.  But what to read?

There are myriads of children's books and literature.  Some classic.  Some excellent.  Some inconsequential.  Reading lists to sort the wheat from the chaff can be very useful.  (Such lists are, of course, never final or definitive.)

Here is one such list, produced by a classical Christian School--courtesy of Justin Taylor:

Letter From America

Why and How to Read Calvin’s Institutes

Justin Taylor

If you haven’t yet read C. S. Lewis’s introduction to Athanasius’s On the Incarnation, I’d highly recommend it.

He wants to refute the “strange idea” “that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books.”

Lewis finds the impulse humble and understandable: the layman looks at the class author and “feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him.”

“But,” Lewis explains, “if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator.” Lewis therefore made it a goal to convince students that “firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.”

I suspect this holds true with respect to evangelical Calvinists and Calvin’s Institutes. Are we in danger of being a generation of secondhanders?

Let me forestall the “I don’t have time” objection. If you have 15 minutes a day and a bit of self-discipline, you can get through the whole of the Institutes faster than you think. Listen to John Piper:

The Legacy of a Post Modern Prophet

Splendid Images, Skin Deep

When we were ensconced in the ivory towers completing our grad and post-grad work, Marshall McLuhan was a name to conjure.   He was "framed" according the academic narratives of the day as a prophet who was discerning the depths of the emerging technological culture, foreseeing the impact of mass media upon us all.  To evoke McLuhan in an intellectual discussion was chic.  To quote him was an intellectual tour de force.   

Alan Jacobs, writing in the New Atlantis, evalutates McLuhan and his legacy.  The distillate?  Nothing much left, really.  To quote a modern poet, "Ain't it funny how times slips away."   Here are some of the more scintillating observations made by Jacobs.

Read, read, read

Read Until Your Brain Creaks

Lit Crit - Literary Notes
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, May 31, 2010

Some months ago, I listed seven brief and basic pointers for writers, and have since wanted to take time to expand on each one of those points with seven observations under each head. So here is the second point, upon which I would like to enlarge.

Read. Read constantly. Read the kind of stuff you wish you could write. Read until your brain creaks. Tolkien said that his ideas sprang up from the leaf mould of his mind. These are the trees where the leaves come from.

So then, what about it? How should writers read?

1. The first thing is that writers should in fact be voracious readers. We live in a narcissistic age, which means that many want to have the praise that comes from having written, without the antecedent labor of actually writing, or the antecedent labor before that of having read anything. Mark Twain once defined a classic as a book that nobody wanted to read, but which everyone wanted to have read. It is a similar situation here. Wanting to write without reading is like wanting to grind flour without gathering wheat, like wanting to make boards without logging, and like wanting to have a Mississippi Delta without any tributaries somewhere in Minnesota. Output requires intake, and literary output requires literary intake.

2. Read widely. Reading shapes your voice, and if you want a wide, experienced voice, you have to get out more. Reading in one genre only is a form of literary provincialism. The timbre of your voice will be affected in good ways by every place you have been, bookwise, and so you should make a point of reading novels, histories, collections of poetry, comedies, biographies, theology, and plays. And don't be a afraid to have twenty books going at once.


3. Read like a reader, and not like someone cramming for a test. If you try to wring every book out like it was a washcloth full of information, all you will do is slow yourself down to a useless pace. Go for total tonnage, and read like someone who will forget most of it. You have my permission to forget most of it, which may or may not be reassuring, but you will forget most of it in either case. Most of what is shaping you in the course of your reading, you will not be able to remember. The most formative years of my life were the first five, and if those years were to be evaluated on the basis of my ability to pass a test on them, the conclusion would be that nothing important happened then, which would be false. The fact that you can't remember things doesn't mean that you haven't been shaped by them.

At the same time, mark everything striking that you read -- you won't remember everything you read, and you won't even remember everything you mark. Nevertheless, it is not a sin to remember some things, or to mark them in a way to be able to find them again.

4. Read like a lover of books, and not like someone who wants to be seen as knowledgeable, or well-read, or scholarly. Read because you want to, not because you need to. Actually, you need to as well, but you need to want to. You also need to want to need to, but I am rapidly getting out of my depth.

5. Pace yourself in your reading. A little bit every day really adds up. If you only read during sporadic reading jags, the fits and starts will not get you anywhere close to the amount of reading you will need to do. It is far better to walk a mile a day than to run five miles every other month. Plod. Make time for reading, and make a daily habit of it, even if it is a relatively small daily habit.

6. As a general pattern, read quality, and go slumming occasionally to remind yourself why quality matters, and what quality is.

7. Read boring books on writing mechanics. Read grammars, dictionaries, writers' memoirs, books of proverbs, books of cliches, books on how to write dialogue, books on how not to write dialogue ("I dropped my toothpaste!" he said crestfallenly.) and books about finding good agents and how to blow away the readers of query letters. Writing is a vocation, and there is a body of professional literature out there -- which is uneven in quality, just like every other kind of book. Read a lot of it anyway.