What Took So Long?
This confidence invites another question: If there’s so much evidence for the importance of knowledge, what took so long? Researchers began to appreciate the crucial relationship between shared knowledge and reading in the 1970s and 1980s. Why did it take decades for knowledge to get its due in curricula?
To answer these questions, we must consider what this new emphasis on knowledge has replaced. What did educators adopt as the guiding principle for the selection of reading content for students?
The answer is “each child’s reading level,” based on that child’s technical reading skill. That individualistic orientation gave rise to the now criticized leveled-reading approach, which aimed to advance general reading ability while still encouraging individualism and student choice.
The technical goal was for each child to read a text at just the right level of difficulty for him or her. Schools would use diagnostic assessments to assign each student a “level,” often represented by letters, numbers, or color codes. Educators organized classroom libraries around these levels, and students were assigned or could choose books within their designated range. Teachers used small-group instruction to work with students at similar levels, adjusting materials and prompts as their skills developed. The hope was that, in a classroom where children varied in reading progress, everyone would read books they could comprehend, and everyone would make steady progress.
Of course, the research presented earlier poses a significant challenge to this instructional plan: How can you assign a “reading level” to a student when comprehension depends not only on technical skill but also on the student’s knowledge of a passage’s topic? Given that few reading researchers were focused on the role of relevant background knowledge, it’s not surprising that this problem was not raised in the professional literature.
But some researchers did sound the alarm on other problems in the use of levels. Some noted that leveled-reading instruction often meant that children were paired with texts they could easily read—and asked how their reading could improve if they were not challenged. Other researchers pointed to a lack of reliability in the assessment of a text’s level of difficulty. Most concerning was the limited evidence that differentiating by level (or not) actually made a difference to student progress.
Yet leveled reading persisted, for a number of reasons: institutional inertia, for example, and the seemingly obvious logic that children should read books that are neither too easy nor too difficult. We want to highlight another, underappreciated factor: deeply held societal beliefs about childhood that seemed to validate the concept of leveled reading.
Historically, our shared understanding of the human condition has influenced the goals established for education and the schooling approaches designed to reach those goals. Prior to the mid-19th century, American education was heavily influenced by Puritan and Enlightenment worldviews, which held that humans are corruptible and that institutions like schools, churches, and governments existed to guide individuals to thoughts and behaviors more in line with God’s intentions and civic order. Prominent thinkers of the time believed that the purpose of schooling was to enable citizens to read the Bible themselves (John Winthrop, Cotton Mather); to engender practical self-sufficiency (Benjamin Franklin); or to fulfill civic duties (Thomas Jefferson, Noah Webster).
This view of humankind and the purpose of school shifted in the mid-19th century. In Europe, Romantic ideas developed in response to the Enlightenment (as seen, for example, in the writing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, and Friedrich Froebel). These new ideas came to America first through transcendentalist thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott and later through philosophers of education such as William Torrey Harris and John Dewey, who brought a radically different sensibility to schooling.
Romanticism resisted organized religion, but in contrast to Enlightenment rationalism and its stress on civil institutions, the Romantics prized personal spirituality and trust in nature and instinct. Learning was seen as a process of growth from within, a natural unfolding, rather than instruction from without. The child’s instincts could be trusted because, as Wordsworth put it, “Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.” The implicit theology of the progressive, child-centered tradition of education held that inborn instincts and natural growth are inherently guided by God. The goal of education was to nurture the child to become what he was always meant to become and would only fail to become if adults interfered in the process. The teacher was a guide or nurturer of this progressive development, not an authority or disciplinarian.
These views need not form an explicit creed in order to shape society’s approach to schooling. As background assumptions, they can influence that approach and make certain truisms resonate. Today, we see the emphasis on individual experience in phrases like “personalized learning” and “teach the child, not the subject.” We view the belief in learning as a natural unfolding in suggestions that a teacher should act as “a guide at the side, not a sage on the stage,” and in warnings not to engage in teaching that is “developmentally inappropriate.”
And how might these background assumptions about the holy nature of children influence an educator’s view of reading? A belief in the primacy of meaningful experience and suspicion toward what’s gained by analytic methods fits well with a belief that children will learn to read by doing a lot of reading, and not necessarily by working through challenging texts that require instruction and help from the teacher. A belief that learning is a product of an individual growing at her own pace fits well with the practice of selecting books based on the child’s learning and growth, rather than selecting texts as a means of prompting that growth.
The Romantic sensibility sits well with another philosophy of reading instruction that survived years of counterevidence: whole language methods to teach decoding. These methods, which have only recently been widely discarded, emphasize meaningful experience (surrounding children with literature) and minimize methods that dissect experience (that is, phonics instruction). Whole language methods also assume that development largely unfolds naturally and that rich literary experiences will go far in helping children acquire the reading skills and habits they need.
Romanticism makes magnificent verse that should be studied as such. As an inspiration for education practices it has been ruinous. Enlightenment ideals of empiricism, reason, progress, and equality make, we think, much better guides and are consistent with a knowledge-rich curriculum.
