The Promise of Early Reading

That the average child will begin walking and talking during his first two years of life is an accepted fact, because it is so commonplace. But what if it wasn’t? Mightn’t you consider it unreasonable to expect a child to develop such an impressive repertoire of motor and verbal skills at such a tender age?

If most children you knew learned to read at the same time as they learned to speak, there would be no need to consider whether their brains were sufficiently myelinated to handle the task. (We’re still not sure babies’ brains are officially myelinated enough to handle speaking at the age they do!) In considering the feasibility of babies learning to read, we would do well to view the phenomenon of reading in its historical context, as Kailing reminds us:

Remember, for countless human generations before just the last hundred years or so, spoken language was the only language a person typically learned. Remember, too, that just a few hundred years before that, nearly everywhere across the world, reading was something that only a tiny percentage of educated monks and scribes ever learned at all.

I believe it is this social history of reading, especially the relatively recent expansion of literacy beyond the most upper and learned classes of society, that accounts for why we still see reading as a “hard” subject, and why we introduce reading too late, when it is harder and less natural to learn.

Glenn Doman was certainly ahead of his time when, in the 1960s, he began teaching parents how to teach their babies to read. As more early reading advocates appear, the idea of children being able to read before they start school is gradually going mainstream. Instead of being viewed as the one in a million, the early reader might soon properly be viewed as the regular kind of genius that every baby is from the moment he is born.

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The promise of early reading…