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One of the Best Things You Can Do for Your Child

When people ask me, what is the most fulfilling thing I’ve done in my whole life, I answer — teaching my six children to read before they entered school. Our family got a bigger return for the time I spent on that activity than anything else I ever did. I urge you, and your family and friends, to do likewise.

The school is the wrong place to learn how to read, anyway, because reading is a solitary, not a group, activity. Reading is not something you do with other people, like playing ball; reading is something you do with a book, and other people in the room are a bad distraction.

Reading is a skill you have to learn to do by yourself (with the help of an adult), like learning how to walk, or ride a bike, or play the piano. Did you ever hear of anyone lining up a bunch of children at pianos and saying, Now we are all going to learn how to play “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” at the same time?

When reading is taught in a classroom, most of the children spend most of their time doing “busy work” to fill up the hours. The days are so long, the repetition is so boring, the books are so stupid, the progress is so slow that so many children, who were eager to learn at the start of the first grade, become bored and disorderly by the end of the first year in school.

This is especially true of little boys who simply are not ready to sit quietly at a desk and do neat work at age five or six. Forcing little boys into a structured classroom environment, and expecting them to be quiet like little girls, is the reason why, a few years later, boys outnumber girls 13 to 1 in learning failure classes and 8 to 1 among the emotionally disturbed. You can avoid this tragedy by teaching your children to read at home.

It is terribly important that your child be taught to read by the correct method before he is taught bad habits such as pretending to read by looking at pictures and guessing at the words. Your children and grandchildren can avoid all those bad habits, and the disappointments that result, if you teach your child to read at home.

You can set your children and grandchildren on the track to a good education, so they can read well enough to get a good job and then progress in a career . . . be able to read for enjoyment and entertainment . . . be able to read the great and inspiring works of literature written in the English language . . . and have horizons of opportunity expanded by reading about the noble deeds of great Americans of achievement.

Most parents work hard to provide their children with the material things of life. Many parents work hard to provide their children with the spiritual things of life — faith in God, moral training, and good and healthy habits. There is something else you can do for your child that is important to both of these goals — because it’s the key to what your child will be able to do on his own. You can teach your child to read.

Why should you? Aren’t you paying the schools to teach your child to read? Yes, you are paying for public schools at the rate of $5,000 per child per year, but you and your neighbors are not getting your money’s worth. You should not think that your children are good readers just because they get good report cards. It’s now the fashion to give all schoolchildren happy report cards in order to build their self-esteem.

Even most of those who graduate from high school and go on to college, do not read well enough to enjoy it or to read anything important. This was pointed out by Al Shanker, longtime president of the nation’s second largest teachers union and a strong supporter of public schools, who says that even the children we think are doing OK are really not. In a remarkable 1989 speech in Denver to a closed audience of teachers, he said that only 3 to 6 percent of 17- and 18-year-olds are able to read editorials and articles in newspapers and magazines, write an essay of several pages, and solve a two-step mathematical problem. That means that 94% of public school graduates cannot do those things. He said that 80% of public school graduates cannot even write a two-paragraph letter to a supermarket manager applying for a job.

That means that, unless your child is in the top 6% of his class, he is probably not getting as good an education as your grandparents received. Under Outcome-Based Education — which eliminates traditional grading on report cards and eliminates all kinds of competition such as honor rolls and spelling bees — you will never know where your child ranks in his class, or what he is learning or not learning.

When I spoke on this subject at Baylor University, an attractive student came up to me and said, “When I entered Baylor, I discovered that I couldn’t read well enough to keep up with my courses. I had to drop out for a year and learn how to read before I continued.” She was honest about her handicap and took steps to remedy it. Most students and adults just fake it, too embarrassed for anyone to know that they cannot read.