Every year elementary schools throughout America expend huge amounts of energy and resources trying to teach their students to read at grade level, but to little avail. For all the workshops, strategies and reading specialists, kids today are on average less literate than their grandparents were at their age.
Teachers and school officials are quick to attribute this on-going failure to our sizeable population of needy and broken-home students, and they are not altogether wrong. But one major reason why so many kids today have trouble learning to read is that are not being taught to read words but to look at pictures.
Consider the typical first-grade reading primers. Most of the space in these booklets is occupied by large, colorful illustrations. The actual reading material consists of no more than a few words per page, and some pages have no words at all.
The idea behind this preponderance of illustrations is that it attracts young students to books and, thus, to literacy. True, the many pretty pictures of animals, houses, schools, parks and children at play do appeal to young students. They love to leaf through their books and memorize the stories told by the pictures. But that does not motivate or teach them to read. On the contrary, the pictures distract them from the scant text and prevent them from forming their own mental images, as true reading requires.
Given a picture of a bright red apple and the word "apple" printed below it in small dark letters, most normal six-year-olds will look at the picture and ignore the word. They need not go through the trouble of decoding the letters a-p-p-l-e and conceptualizing an apple if they have a vivid picture of one right before their eyes. They may learn to trace the word under the picture and say it, but show them the word without the picture and few are able to read it. As Virginia Woolf put it, "Reading is a longer and more complicated process than seeing."
This is not to imply, of course, that illustrations have no educational value. It would be very difficult, if not impossible, to learn math, science, geography and most other subjects without visual illustrations. A good picture is, as they say, worth a thousand words. This power of pictures over words, however, is precisely what makes them so distracting to children trying to learn how to read. Pictures easily distract even literate adults. Note how you can become totally engrossed in a good mystery novel, yet tend to skim over or even ignore the text of a well-illustrated magazine.
In his 1955 landmark book, Why Johnny Can't Read, Rudolph Flesch traced the decline of literacy in our schools to the wholesale abandonment of phonics in the 1920's. But that also happened to be the time when technological developments in printing began to tilt the emphasis in children's books from text to illustrations; and in the 75 years since, as the illustrations became more attractive and plentiful, children have had increasingly more trouble learning to read.
Today, with the added visual distractions of TV and computers--de rigueur in every classroom in America--it's a wonder that our children ever learn to read at all. A major reason why so many high school students have reading problems is that they never outgrew their dependence on pictures.
Before our public schools embark on yet another costly but fruitless reading program, they ought to consider that reading, by definition, is the comprehension of written or printed words. Give the children books with fewer pictures and more words--or, better yet, no pictures, only words---and most will be reading fluently at grade level in a matter of months.