Robert Pondiscio explores problems associated with common methods for teaching reading.
In a famous 1974 commencement address at the California Institute of Technology, [Richard] Feynman described the “cargo cults” that arose on some Pacific Islands after World War II. During the war, islanders had watched airplanes arrive bearing valuable supplies. When the war ended and the planes stopped coming, the islanders tried to lure the planes back by re-creating the conditions that had brought them: They carved runways, set fires along their edges, and built wooden huts for a controller donning makeshift headphones, with pieces of bamboo sticking out like antennae.
“They’re doing everything right,” Feynman observed. “The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land.” …
… Visit an elementary school where struggling fourth or fifth graders are learning to read, and you are likely to see posters reminding children to use the “reading strategies” they’ve been taught:
“Good readers ask questions.”
“Good readers create pictures in their minds.”
“Good readers make connections when they read.”
You will also see teachers doing “think-alouds”—reading out loud to students and stopping to narrate features of a story, make predictions, ask questions, and model making inferences. These earnest, well-intentioned teachers are demonstrating to eager students the habits of good readers: showing children what proficient readers do and encouraging them to imitate those behaviors when they read independently.
This is cargo-cult reading. Push the Feynman analogy a little further, and it starts to do real work. The islanders copied only what was visible—runways, signal fires, the man with headphones—but the system that actually brought the planes depended on an enormous infrastructure that was foreign to them: radio networks, supply chains, trained personnel, command structures, and technical knowledge. What they could see was merely the visible features of a much deeper, more complex system.
Reading works the same way.
