The notion that reading difficulties are a consequence of that skill being evolutionarily secondary is bullshit. Children have an innate desire to be a competent member of their tribe. Evolution equipped them with a need to be competent. That means that all children possess the skill to learn whatever it takes to become a competent member of their group. When learning to read is necessary to be a competent member of society and when there is support for their primary psychological needs for relatedness, autonomy, and competence in that society, children are perfectly capable of tapping their natural learning abilities to do so. The observation that children struggle with reading is more about embedding them in an institutional structure that undermines those needs and/or places other barriers in the way of the children tapping their innate learning capacities.
The folks that posited the secondary skill bullshit were taking mainstream schooling to be the natural way of things, they failed to realize that the institutional social structures of mainstream schooling are the problem. If you are embedded in a mainstream school and want to do better by the children, it would be far more impactful to support their needs rather than adjusting your instructional techniques. Obviously, instruction should be done skillfully, but children need to arrive in the instructional situation after their primary psychological needs have been satisfied, not before. Remember, all adults with in loco parentis duties of care (not just teachers) must, first and foremost, ensure the well-being of the children. They can attend to their others duties once the duty of care has been fulfilled.
No comments:
Post a Comment