Becoming Literate

I was five years old and hazardously bored watching my parents and neighbors play Canasta. My mother tore a piece of paper off the scoring pad and wrote my name in large letters – JOHNNY.  “That’s how you spell your name,” she said. “Go practice writing your name.” I traced the letters, then copied them and from that point on always knew how to spell and write my name.

In the first grade I sat in the small wooden chair in a semi-circle with a few other children.  The teacher pointed to the picture on the flip chart of Dick and Jane.  Below the picture was a word.  The teacher said, “This word is look, l-o-o-k.” She named the letters as she pointed to them. “You can remember this word because the two letters in the middle are round like the eyes we use when we look at something.”

In third grade my friend Richard was reading a book with pages full of words and no pictures.  The book was Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, about the first flight of American bombers in World War II over Tokyo.  Richard showed me the few pages in the middle of the book with old black and white photos of the B-17 airplanes and bombs exploding on the city.  When he returned it to the library I checked it out and read it. 

That same year, Kelly and I snuck a pack of cigarettes out of a drawer in his mother’s kitchen.  We took them to the creek behind his house where I smoked my first cigarette. A few days later I suggested we get some of his mom’s cigarettes and go to the creek.  My friend said he couldn’t, that his mama would whip him if she caught him sneaking cigarettes again. I learned something about risk-taking and sneakiness.

Anyone can tell stories about learning – academic and intellectual skills, the behaviors and habits that connect us to our friends, mannerisms that we think are a part of becoming older, more able and more admired – how to wear our hair and our clothes, to walk and talk, to behave sexually and to play sports and music.  We learn by being taught, by imitation and by trial and error. If learning goes well, if we get enough help from our parents, friends and teachers, we learn to think ahead – not just toward tomorrow or next weekend, but further into the future, toward what we want to be and how we want to be.

Learning never stops.  Living is learning.  We may become tired, frustrated and lose confidence in ourselves as learners; but even those are learned beliefs about who and how we are.

Schools exist to promote learning. The learning promoted by school is institutionalized learning accumulated over centuries.  Though it varies slightly from place to place and time-to-time, we all know – generally – what comprises school learning.  It is academic and intellectual – reading, writing, mathematics, the natural and social sciences, the arts, plus other things depending on institutional mission and community values.  School learning is skills and concepts graduated on the premise that learning correlates to the age of the learner, thus we have grade levels based on chronological age.

In many ways, schooling is a strange idea based on faulty premises – that teachers know what to teach and how to teach it, that 20 plus children placed in a room all day with a teacher will cooperate with the teacher’s intentions, that hundreds of children or teenagers in a school will bend their collective will to the charge of a few dozen adults who intend to teach them, that all eight year-olds are enough alike that we can create a third grade curriculum that starts in September and ends in May, and that the next year, all those eight year-olds who have become nine will be ready for the fourth grade curriculum.

I have been a teacher for almost 40 years, but when I step back and shed the history and methods of schooling and consider its purposes and the premises, I am amazed that it actually works – sometimes.