The Children Are Not Reading

And it is not acceptable

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

As a teacher in the public school classroom, I recognize that education is in a tough spot, even more so after COVID.

However, in the 21st-century classroom, there is no excuse for a child not learning to read.

In my public school classroom, there is a lack of reading either by choice or inability. Some may argue that we can keep up with a lack of literacy through audiobooks, video, technology, and tools of communication. I disagree.

In our history, the only people who did not read were oppressed people. They didn’t read because they were not allowed to learn.

History Lesson

Let’s go back.

In the US, as well as in other countries, literacy has been used as a means of control.

Reading has typically been something for the privileged few, the upper echelon if you will. They were the only ones who could afford to pay for education and didn’t need their children in the fields to survive.

I’m sure you remember from your history lessons the Slave Revolt of 1831. After the revolt, a law was passed making it illegal to teach enslaved people and even free people of color to read.

But, you probably didn’t learn about people like my Grandpa.

People like my Grandpa should be in the history books

Grandpa was a man born in the south who grew up in poverty but wasn’t considered a person of color.

His father was a sharecropper, an often overlooked group of white immigrant people who shared the same fate as freed slaves.

I should add that his mother was Cherokee Indian but passed as white. My grandpa was darker than most of the white men we knew. I remember as an elementary student learning about different countries and coming home and asking what country he was from.

Of course, he said America, surprised that I was asking. “Then why is your skin so dark? You must be from Italy, Spain, or Mexico,” I countered. I still remember his chuckle and slight wink when he said, “We just tan good.”

Grandpa went to school as much as the farm would allow until second grade. At that point, he was tall and strong for his age and his father needed “more hands” to work the farm. School became nothing more than a memory.

Life as a non-reading adult

He went on to grow up, marry, and find a sharecropping spot of his own. Eventually, because of the rise in factories around their small town, my grandmother was able to obtain work outside the farm and stabilize their finances. This transition gave them the ability to buy their own small place.

Eventually, he joined her in “public work” as he called it. He often told me stories about the textile mill where he worked. How he loaded the yarn onto trucks, how it was dyed, and turned into cloth. It was hard physical labor, and he wanted me to be educated, so I wouldn’t have to work as hard as he did.

He said they asked him to be management several times, but he continued to turn it down with the excuse that he didn’t need the extra headache. But, the truth was, he couldn’t read and was ashamed for anyone to know.

Poverty

It wasn’t my grandfather’s skin color that gave him a life with few opportunities, but rather, his financial status.

Poverty is real and in a small town, people know who the poor are. People look down on the poor - even today. Whether you’re white, black, or Hispanic, poverty is always looked down on. It’s as if the privileged think that the poor choose a life that barely meets their physical needs.

My grandmother, a woman from a family of Irish immigrants and raised in Appalachia, said she remembered the things people said about her as a child and the way even adults made fun of the potato sack she wore as a dress.

The slurs of hill white, poor white trash, and trailer trash stayed with them and shaped their self-esteem and generations after them.

Lack of literacy

Attending school wasn’t mandatory for my grandpa, so when the family needed him, they just took him out.

Now, among our students in poverty, schooling is mandatory. Parents can’t just remove their children from school, so the kids attend school AND work because their families need them.

I can’t tell you the number of students who sleep during class because they worked all night. The number of students who ask me for more time to complete an assignment because they go to work after school to help their parents pay bills and put food on the table grows every year. The students just like my grandpa.

They will go on to graduate because educators have pushed them through each year. Like my grandpa, they will survive. They will work, marry, and have children without knowing how to read.

This is not acceptable. It should not be our country’s normal.

We should be doing better

I teach tenth graders, and by the time I get them, the administration wants me to teach Julius Cesar and argumentative writing to students who can barely read at best.

Reading is a fundamental skill. A precursor to learning about the rest of the world. If students can’t read at a literate level, teaching is not possible.

The “Achievement Gap” is real. Studies indicate that the problem is a racial one, which is true, but there are higher rates of poverty among minorities leading me to believe that the achievement gap is an economic one.

It may seem that by enforcing truancy laws and requiring children to stay in school we are doing them a service, a privilege denied to my grandpa.

However, if they are in school all day and work all night, have we changed anything? They still can’t read.

You can help

In my current school district, they asked parents who could not speak English if they would like to learn. The response was overwhelming.

They really wanted to learn, and even though most of them worked long hours, they still showed up. Several teachers donated their time and met with the parents and began teaching them English.

What if we offered classes for the functionally illiterate in our schools? Would the response be the same? Quite possibly. It could be the beginning of ending generational cycles of poverty and shame.

Recognize the truth. Schools cannot do it all. The job is too big. Volunteer, start literacy programs, reach out, and help one person learn to read.

Concluding thoughts

So, why aren’t the children reading?

No one has made a law or enforced rules that prevent those in poverty from learning to read. No one is preventing them openly from learning to read like the slaves in 1831.

What stops them is the fear of not helping to feed their families. What stops them is a growling belly. What stops them is the inability to stay awake because they haven’t eaten enough or were up all night working. It is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs being played out in real-time.

Do not allow yourself to be fooled. While more people may be graduating from high school than in my grandpa’s day, it doesn’t mean they are literate.

There are no laws on the books preventing my students from learning to read, but poverty is real oppression. Poverty is quite possibly the culprit keeping students from reading.