how do you teach english to kids who can't read?

an increasingly prevalent pedagogical question

My class was struggling through Macbeth. This is common and has been for years. There is a phenomenon I call “Shakespeare brain” that happens when people read the Bard aloud. Because they are nervous about Shakespeare and his tricky language, they stumble over everyday words they actually know how to pronounce. It’s like the scene in Dumb & Dumber when Lloyd tries to read the newspaper and stumbles over the word “the.”

But this year the kids were struggling beyond the average. I had to stop often and explain what we had just read because it was so hard to follow the students’ reading. Before class one day, a girl looked at me sort of conspiratorially and whispered: “Mr. Coffman, you can tell who read as a kid and who didn’t.”

This girl is incredibly bright and was my Lady Macbeth for our in-class reading. She had never read the play, and apart from reading Julius Caesar her freshman year, had never read Shakespeare. And she killed it. She grew up reading. Shakespeare is not hard to decode if you’ve spent a lot of time reading. There are some words that a handy footnote helps clarify, but pronunciation is certainly not overly challenging.

However, kids just don’t read that much anymore. Adam Kotsko, writing in Slate, made this point in a recent article. A college professor, Kotsko has witnessed a marked decline in literacy in his students over the past 10 years, especially exacerbated in the past five years. This matches my experience. When I first started teaching high school a decade ago, I could count on the majority of students having read things like Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, and the Percy Jackson series. Today, this is not the case. Many, even at the Honors level and even in a wealthy school, simply do not read and never really had the habit.

I don’t say this to bemoan this generation or demean them. It would be highly cynical of me to make my living by teaching these kids and not believe that change is possible. By and large, they are living in a world created for them by adults who should know better. Kotsko says it rightly: “We are not complaining about our students. We are complaining about what has been taken from them.” A variety of factors, with smartphones leading the line, have deprived them of literacy and the attention required to read and digest a lengthy passage of prose or poetry.

Kotsko lists smartphones and other digital technologies, the disruption created by Covid school closures and the switch to online learning, and pedagogical changes to the way reading is taught (I wrote about the problems with “whole language” reading instruction and other educational fads here) as factors contributing to the current milieu. I agree with all of these issues.

But there is one key thing that he doesn’t name in his article: parents. I understand why he avoids it as it is tricky to be too generic on this issue. Many, though, are the parent meetings I’ve sat in where parents lament their child’s technological dependence as if it has nothing whatsoever to do with their own, you know, parenting. Not to mention, the parents’ own technology habits, which are generally every bit as overwhelming as their kids,’ and which their children observe on a daily basis.

The school I teach at is wealthy beyond measure. I know that issues regarding literacy, parental involvement, and even the number of books in the home are largely class-based. I get that. But I teach the upper class—the group above any other that should be immune to these issues—and the problem exists in this demographic as well.

Look, when it comes down to it this is the truth: Parents pass on what they value to their kids. Literacy has decreased because parents don’t value it very much and this devaluation reflects our culture more broadly. Not everything a parent does with their children takes, of course. But if parents read—and especially if parents read to their kids—their kids gain an enhanced vocabulary and easier literacy for themselves. Reading aloud also helps parents and children bond with one another and equips kids with emotional and social awareness. Seeing your parents read is huge. It confers implicit knowledge that what you’re being taught to do in school has meaning beyond the classroom. You’re unlikely to see your dad puzzling over Algebra problems or witness your mom studying Periodic Table flashcards, but if you see mom and dad reading, you see how adults apply what you learn from 8-3 Monday through Friday.

I do not say this to point fingers. I learned from reading Kotsko’s article (and you should read it, too). But everything he lists is a systemic probably and, basically, unfixable by individuals. What can I do about smartphones? Unless I get a DeLorean equipped with a flux capacitor, I can’t rewrite Covid policy and give back the years the locusts stole to those kids. The same logic applies to undoing the harmful regime of “whole language” reading instruction and the dismantling of phonics-based pedagogy.

We can—and should—work for systemic reforms. And yet, we are responsible mostly for the people right in front of us today. Those people in front of us today are our children and others who fall within our orbit. And if we wish to raise them to stand out from this world, for the life of the world, we need to practice an alternative pedagogy in our homes. We need to read to and with our kids. We need them to see us reading and talking about ideas instead of things. “Great minds discuss ideas,” as the famous quote has it. We need to do our part within our four walls to stem this tide and make sure kids can read again.

To come back to my Macbeth anecdote from the beginning of this post, you could take my student’s observation back a generation: “Mr. Coffman, you can tell whose parents are readers and whose are not.”

Parents who read will solve our literacy crisis faster than any government program or instruction model. Change starts in the home.