Reading Lessons: The Debate over Literacy - Hardcover

Coles, Gerald

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809064901 ISBN 13: 9780809064908

Publisher: Hill & Wang Pub, 1998

Synopsis

Examines how both the phonics and whole language reading instruction methods not only fail to teach children to read and write, but also harm their thinking and behavior patterns

About this title

About the Author

Gerald Coles writes often on literacy, learning, and psychology. He is the author of The Learning Mystique and has taught at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and the University of Rochester. He lives in Ithaca, New York.

From Kirkus Reviews

Specialized but well-argued appeal to reframe the debate over poor reading achievement in schools by looking outside the classroom. Coles (Psychiatry/Univ. of Rochester; The Learning Mystique, 1988) challenges the educational establishment as well as scientists and politicians on the causes of poor reading skills in both children and adults. It misses the point, he notes, to reduce the matter to the question of phonics vs. whole-word instruction, although governments and study commissions are legislating the issue, largely on the side of phonics (that is, decoding words by sounding them out). Coles traces this pedagogical quarrel from the theory of ``natural'' learning, first advanced in the 18th century, through the open education experiments of the 1960s and the recent emphasis on thinking and analytic skills as a goal of reading instruction. The educators' disagreements have been further muddled by psychological theories that supported segregating children into groups based on test performances. Accelerating information about the brain and its functions also came into play, with alleged proof that slow readers were somehow neurologically impaired. Coles questions why a learner's emotional state, self-perception, and life situation should take a backseat to such concepts. Both educators and politicians should stop tinkering with the technicalities of classroom instruction and begin to deal with the real causes of illiteracy, including a lack of substantive commitment to education, he urges. ``Money matters,'' says Coles, both in funding smaller classes and better trained teachers and in providing children from poor families with minimum health care, good nutrition, a safe home base, and a stable family. With few real-life examples to leaven the dense technical arguments for a general reader, this book is most likely to convert those already in the church; still, a strong case on behalf of an educational commitment to the whole child. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Hill & Wang Pub
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0809064901
• ISBN 13: 9780809064908
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 212