On Curling and Literacy

Huge news out of the curling world! Canada has reached the 3-versus-4 Page playoff at world women's curling championship!  But it wasn't all easy:

If you're not a curling fan, you're probably a bit confused by all this.  What, after all, does it mean to have a  "6-1 lead through four ends?"  Or to run "one of her own rocks into the Swiss pair?" And who in the heck is "Ott?" But your failure to understand the preceding paragraph probably does not mean that you are illiterate, or  that your reading comprehension is subpar.   Instead, it simply betrays your lack of knowledge about the ostensible subject matter of this blog post: curling.  In fact, you probably know all the words that are used in the preceding paragraph ("rocks," "ends" "skip") you just don't know what they mean in this pariticular context.

This very simple point--that you need to know what you're reading about in order to really understand it--has been made again, and again, and again by the philosopher/educational theorist E.D. Hirsch.  And in light of President Obama's call for “assessments that don’t simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test," Hirsch strikes a similar tone in his recent New York Times op-ed, Reading Test Dummies.

The crux of Hirsch's argument is that schools have responded to the incentives tied to standardized reading tests by teaching reading as a skill.  Because teachers never know what the subject matter of the actual passages on the reading tests are going to be--they could be on curling, baseball, the Constitution, or butterfies--teachers spend their time teaching students "skills" like "making inferences" or "finding the main idea."  But, Hirsch argues, reading is not "merely a 'skill' that can be transferred from one passage to another...[and] reading scores [cannot] be raised by having young students endlessly practice strategies on trivial stories."  To truly raise a generation of literate citizens, Hirsch argues, we need to reform standards and tests so that they reward the teaching of substantive knowledge: science, history, geography, and so forth.

Hirsch's point is an important and a good one.  Reading "skills" only go so far, and an overreliance on teaching literacy in a vacuum threatens to create a generation of students who aren't very literate in any meaningful sense.  A child might be able to "identify the main idea" and understand all the words in an article about the Supreme Court, but if they have no idea what the Supreme Court does or how it functions, they are not going to understand that article any more than those uninitated in curling can understand the passage above.  Just as bad, overemphasis on reading as a skill strips reading of some of its joy.  Think about it: are you reading this blog post right now because you think that "making inferences" is fun?  Because you like "finding the main idea?"  No, more likely, you're reading it because you are interested in the subject matter of this post, and you probably have some background knowledge in the topic.  But teaching a generation of kids that reading is simply about skills and not about content risks undermining the very fun of diving into a book, article or blog post about a topic that's interesting. 

If literacy is the ultimate end to be achieved, then we as educators, philanthropists and citizens would do well to focus our attention not just on reading qua reading, but also on things like the arts, social studies, science, and so forth.  Giving kids the background knowledge to understand a wide range of texts is critical, and teaching kids about stuff will give them the motivation to read about subjects they find interesting.  That's why recent cutbacks in history, geography, arts, and so forth are ultimately so counterproductive.  Indeed, as Hirsch points out, this de-emphasis on teaching content in favor of teaching skills may, ironically, explain why test scores have stayed flat despite tremendous investment of money and instructional time in reading qua reading.