I recently attended a school board meeting where I heard a teaching principal say something that made me sit up and take notice.
She was talking about how, if a kid can’t read at grade level yet, what you need to do is ‘meet them where they are’. For example, if there’s a ‘science’ lesson about building a ‘volcano’ using baking soda, vinegar and play dough, but some of the kids can’t read the materials, you do the reading for them, so they can still participate in the lesson.
Or, I thought, you could have those kids keep working on reading until they get on track, and they can read about volcanoes later on.
Seriously, is there anything to be learned from a day-long grade-school science project that a kid wouldn’t be able to learn in 10 minutes later on, by reading about it — assuming that he learns to read with reasonable speed and comprehension? There isn’t.
So why in the world wouldn’t you have the kids who can’t yet read work on reading during that time?
So in fourth grade¹, if some kids can’t read, we ‘meet them where they are’, by reading to them and for them.
By eighth grade, they still can’t read, so we continue to ‘meet them where they are’, explaining what’s in their textbooks so they don’t have to read them.
And so on, until you have high school students who can’t figure out why they’re even given textbooks, since clearly no one intends that they actually read them.
By graduation, they still can’t read, but there’s one thing we know for sure that they’ve learned: If they don’t bother to move forward, society will always ‘meet them where they are’. If the mountain always comes to Mohammed, why should he bother to go to the mountain, or even learn that there is a mountain?
I’ll leave it to the reader to consider the many and varied ways in which this philosophy (which is far more dangerous to both education and liberty than anything in Critical Race Theory, or whatever the latest curricular bugaboo is) plays out once those kids leave school.
¹ Fourth grade is the point at which it’s generally accepted that kids have ‘learned to read’, and are ready to start ‘reading to learn’.
