How I Taught My Kid to Read

Serbian is a slavic language with 100% letter for letter pronunciation. You can probably learn to read in Serbian in 30 mins and impress your friends. Understanding it is another matter :)

> Does innovation in general bother you?

Only when I have numerous first hand accounts of where it doesn’t work. Just as I have from my extended family, most of who are teachers and all of who state that kids who have been taught outside of the standard educational system are always behind kids who were not.

This is often even true for kids who have received additional tuition outside of school where their tutors haven’t taught them the same learning tools as what the school teaches (eg different methods for long division, or ways of teaching phonics) because this can often leave the child confused between the two systems when getting taught in class.

> what we're doing isn't a very new idea

Just because it’s not a new idea it doesn’t mean it isn’t also total garbage.

> Well again, we didn't exactly teach her, she taught herself with our guidance. She speaks English, Swedish and German, and she's learning French and Spanish

Learning to read is not just about learning the shapes of spoken languages. Learning to read also teaches literacy and creative writing. It engages parts of the imagination that other forms of creative play do not. Plus it also teaches mental discipline as well.

You claim she can read as well as her peers (which I doubt you’ve done an actual impartial comparison. Partly because kids would never agree to a study under such conditions and partly because of your emotional connection to the “test subject”) but what about those other skills that reading teaches?

My own experience also mirrors that which my family of teachers have observed. I showed very little interest in reading when I was a child. The only things I chose to read were technical schematics and programming manuals for 70s and 80s computing hardware. That had a really significant impact on my writing skills; to the extent that I massively struggled to pass my English exams. The amount of extra hours I had to put in towards the end of my teenage years to compensate cannot be understated.

> She has two personal tutors with her that guide her into learning what she wants. Public school does not offer that.

It’s not an “either/or”. You can still teach your kids things they’re interested in outside of school as well. Just make sure you don’t contradict the curriculum when you do this :)

> Also I find the typo here [1] a tiny bit ironic [2]

Yeah, typing on a phone while getting ready for work will lead to some autocorrect fails. To be honest I’m surprised that was my only error.

Time spent listening to hard books is for most children also more marginally useful than time spent trying to learn to read very simple books independently, especially at the earliest ages.

Kids who grow up in supportive and highly literate households are going to learn to read sooner or later, without needing any excessive focus on drills. There’s nothing inherently wrong with spending some amount of time on phonics, but as a minor addition to lots of conversation and reading aloud, not as the main focus.

If primary schools (some of the most extremely progressive ones partly excepted) replaced most of the time currently spent on regimented reading, spelling, and grammar instruction with the teacher just reading a variety of long, difficult (just within reach of the audience) books aloud, it would do wonders for student language skills.

Almost all of your points boil down to homeschooled children not being convenient for teachers used to children who have been in day school since they were of school age. If the only bad result of your reading lots of manuals was poor grades in English for a few years this is of no consequence. Learning to express one’s thoughts about things you care about is a very different skill from imitating research in English literature.

If you want to learn more about democratic and child centred education as practiced at Summerhill I can highly recommend the founding Headmaster, A.S. Neill’s book on the school, Summerhill[1]. You are of course free to believe whatever you want about child centred methods of education but Summerhill’s students are not handicapped in life success or exams by the freedom to attend lessons or not as they choose, not are Sudbury’s[2].

You do not need an “impartial assessment” to know how well children are reading if you can read at the level of a university graduate. You can look at the books they read for pleasure and assess the level for yourself. If the child doesn’t quite get it but they’re close enough to try to read those books and enjoy them that’s a good thing.

The idea that you should take care not to contradict the curriculum is ... Education is meant to be for children, not teachers.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerhill_School

[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school

Good teachers with autonomy get better results than good teachers without autonomy, but bad teachers with autonomy get worse results than without autonomy.