Cake For Breakfast

I found this little tidbit today when reading some email lists.

This isn’t an answer to the twenty hour question but the question
reminded me of a bit from “Learning all the Time” by John Holt.

“At the Ny Lille Skole (New Little School), near Copenhagen, which I
described in “Instead of Education,” there is no formal reading
program at all – no classes, no reading groups, no instruction, no
testing, nothing. Children (like adults) read if , and when, and
what, and with whom, and as much as they want to. But all the
children know – it is not announced, just on of those things you find
out by being in the school – that anytime they want, they can go to
Rasmus Hansen, a tall, deep voiced, slow speaking teacher (for many
years the head teacher of the school), and say, “Will you read with
me?” and he will say, “Yes.” The child picks something to read, goes
with Rasmus to a little nook, not a locked room but a cozy and
private place, sits down right beside him and begins to read aloud.
Rasmus does almost nothing. From time to time he says softly, “Ja,
Ja,” implying “That’s right, keep going.” Unless he suspects the
child may be getting into a panic, he almost never points out or
corrects a mistake. If asked for a word, he simply says what it is.
After a while, usually about twenty minutes or so, the child stops,
closes the book, gets up, and goes off to do something else. One
could hardly call this teaching. Yet, as it happens, Rasmus was
trained as a reading teacher. He told me that it had taken him many
years to stop doing – one at a time – all the many things he had been
trained to do, and finally to learn that this tiny amount of moral
support and help was all that children needed of him, and that
anything more was of no help at all.

I asked Rasmus how much of this “help” children seemed to need before
they felt ready to explore reading on their own. He said that from
his records of theses reading sessions he had found that the longest
amount of time any of the children spent reading with him was about
thirty hours, usually in sessions of twenty minutes to a half hour,
spread out over a few months. But, he added, many children spent
much less time than that with him, and many others never read with
him at all. I should add that almost all of the children went from
the Ny Lille Skole to the gymnasium, a high school far more difficult
and demanding than all but a few secondary schools in the U.S.
However and whenever the children many have learned it, they were all
good readers.

Thirty hours. I had met that figure before. Years earlier, I had
served for a few weeks as a consultant to a reading program for adult
illiterates in Cleveland, Ohio. Most of the students were from
thirty to fifty years old: most were poor; about half were black,
half white; most had moved to Cleveland either from Appalachia or the
deep South. There were three sessions, each lasting three weeks. In
each session, students went to classes for two hours a night five
nights a week: that is thirty hours. To teach the teachers used
Caleb Gattegno’s “Words in Color,” a very ingenious (I now think, too
ingenious) method. Used well, it can be very effective. But it
makes great demands on the teachers. That is, it can be used very
badly. Few of the volunteer teachers in the program had previously
used “Words in Color”; they themselves had been trained in an
intensive course just before they began to teach the illiterates. I
observed a good many of the teachers in one of the three sessions.
Most of them used the method fairly well, one or two very well, a few
very badly. The students and classes themselves varied; some classes
were much more supportive, some students much more bold and vigorous
than others. I don’t know what, if any, follow-up studies of the
program were ever made, or what the students did with their newfound
skill. My strong impression at the end of my three weeks was that
most of the students in the classes I had observed had learned enough
about reading in their thirty hours so that they could go on
exploring and reading, and could become as skillful as they wanted to
be on their own.”

And this other bit:

“Some years later I first heard of Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator
and reformer, who, until the army ran him out of the country, had
been teaching reading and writing to illiterate adult peasants in the
very poorest villages. One might say that his method was a kind of
politically radical, grown-up version of the method Sylvia Ashton-
Warner described in her books “Spinster and Teacher.” That is, he
began by talking with these peasants about the conditions and
problems of their lives (this was what the army didn’t like), and
then showed them how to write and read the words that came up most in
their talk. He too found that it took only about thirty hours of
teaching before these wretchedly poor and previously demoralized
peasants were able to go on exploring reading on there own. Thirty
hours. One school week. That is the true size of the task.”

Holt doesn’t say that after thirty hours everyone knew how to read,
he says they had enough information to explore reading on their own.