"But more importantly, why was the fact that Jake could not read not detected by his teachers?"

even more importantly what did his mum do/not do ?

Great essay Marion. I encourage—if not beg—you to constantly raise your voice about these issues. Our children desperately need the kind of intelligent perspectives you clearly embrace.

Reading your essay and also Sophie Masson’s (http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=3081)I have a glimmer that proper enlightenment might actually one day return to our classrooms.

It is the first time in thirty years that I have felt this way.

Of course for at least two generations of children, it will be too little and far too late…

Kenny Hit the nail on the head. It is what has happened at home that is much more importance than what happens as school. Those kids coming from a language rich, print rich environmet have much less trouble with literacy. Note this exchange. I use it because it is emblematic. ABC The Health Report: 17 January 2005 - Literacy
Summary: ... Norman Swan asks Guest Reid Lyon About reading disabled. Reid Lyon: agrees and states quite openly that majority of the children with literacy problemsfrom disadvantaged backgrounds, those children who have verbal interactions with parents are read to etc etc read it at: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/helthrpt/stories/s1266657.htm - Despite this obvious fact Reid Lyon thinks that phonetics is the answer when he has clear enunciated the cause is little to do with teaching methods. Who is Reid Lyon? You may not know if you have not followed the debate but he is Chief of the Child Development and Behaviour Branch of the US National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda, Maryland, "a world leader in the area of literacy research". and an advocate of phonetic/phoneme methods. (179 words)

Reading is not just a matter of recognising written words, either by logical means or guesswork - that is just the first step. True reading is the recognition of the meaning of the text. Children cannot be expected to acquire learning from the text while they are trying to work out which word they are looking at. They need to be given the tools to work with, a knowledge of letters and how they relate to each other to form a word, then how the words relate to each other to form text. These areas of study used to be called spelling and grammar. The human mind learns by seeking patterns and by repetition. Life would be easier for children learning to read if this innate tendency was utilised by the current crop of educational gurus.

Skybird

Thanks Marion for your essay. I have three children who are not disadvantaged nor suffer from a lack of written material at home. Only one of the three is a voracious reader. One of them has only just begun serious reading because of year 11 English requirements and a third effectively had to finish school at around year 6 because of reading difficulties. He has had to figure his own way of reading out. At 20 I am not entirely sure of his comprehension abilities, however he has acquired sufficient skills to correct others spelling and grammar to a basic level.

Without reading skills, there is very little that he was able to do in class, leading to a lasting sadness at a young age. We reluctantly sent him to high school (noone is held back it seems) but things got worse as he ended up in a class predominated by boys with social problems and he learned a whole range of "skills" that would have lead to a horrible future life.

Luckily he did not stay at high school long as there was no positive outcome possible, despite the efforts of some of the teachers who obviously showed interest and understanding.

We had tried all sorts of strategies over the years. Eye tests, eye exercises, a whole range of private tutoring methods and our own attempts at teaching to no obvious benefit. Reading Recovery at school was an obvious failure. He spent more time at that than any other activity it seemed. We finally came across the "Parents as Tutors" program at the University of Canberra. The method certainly seemed to make a lot of sense to me, but our son was too old for the type of material they had to offer and he had become convinced of his "dumbness" by that time.

At 16, he obtained a Diploma in 3D Animation, and later enrolled in a horticulture couse for a semester at 19. He is still finding his way at the moment, but his outlook on life has improved 300 percent.

A somewhat belated response to comments by Kenny and Richard.

It seems to me very strange that if a child fails to learn to read, and this is not identified by the teacher, it is the parent, not the teacher, that is held responsible.

This view shifts the responsibility for teaching children how to read, and for failure in learning to read, from the school to the home, and is not consistent with the research evidence (see for example the Scottish research study by Johnston and Watson, which indicates that children from all kinds of home backgrounds can learn to read if given appropriate instruction, regardless of what exposure they have had to language and print prior to entering school).

Given the amount of time and money spent in training our teachers to teach children how to read, it does seem strange that we should imagine that untrained parents (and grandparents) have a greater role in teaching children how to read than teachers who have been trained, or should have been trained, to do this job.

One might also ask how we could have moved from a society in which the majority of the population was illiterate to a society where virtually everyone can read and write, if learning to read and write was seen as the responsibility of the home rather that the responsibility of the school. The main purpose of compulsory schooling is surely to ensure that everyone is given the opportunity to learn how to read and write, regardless of how literate or illiterate their parents might be.

If the teachers, and those who train them, are convinced that teaching will make little difference to the final outcome in learning to read, there is no real incentive or purpose in making reading instruction more effective, since it is assumed that this will have little effect on the final outcome.

This attitude seems to have become ingrained in our teachers, teacher educators, and educational bureaucrats, which is why schools and teachers make so little effort to teach reading effectively in our schools