Member-only story
American Students from Fourth Grade to College are Struggling to Read
Really, Americans, period, are struggling, and we should all be concerned.
After a while, proficient readers can forget that reading is a skill. Since, with practice, reading becomes automatic, even second nature. But true reading requires more than decoding letters strung together on a page (or screen). True literacy requires comprehension, which demands focused attention to decipher not just the words and sentences but the writer’s intention behind them.
This sort of concentration isn’t always easy to achieve, but I can do it on demand when I need to, like reading a novel in one sitting while traveling or the dense scientific research I read for this newsletter. Still, I sometimes forget that I can only do this because I learned and developed the necessary skills. But it seems youth today, from grade school through college, aren’t learning these skills.
Grade School
Most children in The United States learn to read using one of two primary methods: phonics or whole language, which is also known as “balanced literacy.”
Phonics teaches kids how to read by sounding words out and breaking longer words into units — which I how I was taught to read. Meanwhile, balanced…
