Is Carl Hendrick Right about Reading?

Yes. Even more than he may realize.

Photo by toehk

In The Humility of the Page: The Lost Ethics of Deep Reading Carl Hendrick (How Learning Happens) provides one of the richest reading experiences I’ve had in a long time. He laments the layered losses related to our failure to engage in deep reading, concerns similar to Maryanne Wolf’s in Reader, Come Home.

However, given my current, narrower concern about disagreements related to beginning reading instruction that have been argued over for decades yet still persist, I would like to apply Carl Hendrick’s points to one specific circumstance and pose this question:

Are the opponents of a shift in foundational reading skills instruction that prioritizes orthographic mapping a good example of the problematic attitudes and attributes explored in “The Humility of the Page”?

I’ve listed below the areas of concern articulated in the article that I believe relate to the obstructionists, those whose intransigence has prevented a widespread shift in foundational skills instruction that is essential if we want to get the greatest number of students decoding in the least amount of time in order to make it possible for them to independently tackle complex text.

The attitudes and attributes Hendrick explores that minimize our minds are:

• feeding on the familiar and rejecting the foreign

• failing to confront conflicting ideas

• exhibiting hubris instead of humility

• rejecting the discomfort and dissonance of an important idea

• relying on instinct vs. making informed decisions

• clinging to the known vs. engaging with the unknown

• dwelling in predetermined ideas rather than in differences and disagreement

• showing intellectual brittleness vs. mindful flexibility

• judging before understanding

• reacting before listening

• confirming sameness vs. confronting differentness

Hendrick writes:

Reading has become less an encounter with otherness than a sort of hyper-consumption of sameness where we feed on the familiar until the foreign becomes unpalatable . . . To inhabit unfamiliar minds, to wrestle with conflicting ideas, to sit with discomfort rather than resolve it prematurely got me out of myself and fostered a kind of humility, a recognition that my instincts were not final . . . We are being trained, not explicitly, but implicitly, to treat words as units of utility . . . We are no longer invited to encounter authentic otherness, but to loop endlessly within the contours of what we already know, believe, and prefer. We become trapped in a hall of increasingly vacuous mirrors, fed content that flatters, not confronts, until thinking itself feels like friction . . . To read carefully is to say: your words matter; your complexity matters; your thought, even if difficult or dissonant, matters . . . It [the algorithm] is designed not to deepen our perception, but to refine our preferences . . . Without the capacity to dwell in difference, to engage with arguments we do not agree with, or to follow a thread longer than 280 characters, we become intellectually and morally brittle . . . To give ourselves to a complex text is to practice the patience we need for one another. It is a rehearsal in understanding before judging, listening before reacting . . . Reading, in the end, is an act of faith. Faith that other minds matter, that complexity deserves our patience, that truth emerges not from confirmation but from confrontation with difference . . . It is to choose the difficult gift of another's mind over the easy comfort of our own.

These words are worth a second reading. I’ll wait.

In the three decades since I stopped teaching the complexities of deep reading in the high school English classroom and transitioned to the challenges of teaching beginning reading instruction in elementary school, not once have I looked back with longing. I have many fond memories, to be sure, of both students and staff, but working with the little ones who can be motivated by trifles and trinkets—and who openly express their affection and gratitude—is simply much more satisfying.

However, “The Humility of the Page” has affected me so profoundly that it made me long to teach it to my senior classes of yesteryear. In The Republic we encounter Plato’s Philosopher King, the benevolent dictator who will save the state. It may be that the modern-day equivalent is the English Teacher Monarch: the wise soul who reads widely and understands both the mechanical and the metaphorical—words as units of utility as well as the whole book as a vessel for the ideas of others lurking in unfamiliar minds.

I freely admit that by extracting those key phrases from the article and unilaterally applying them to the opposition, I have taken a leap of logic by simply asserting rather than proving that my stance in the reading debate is the correct one—in particular, my emphasis on the crucial significance of orthographic mapping to inform our instruction. I tried to match Carl Hendrick’s conclusions to what I see as the entrenched positions of some in the Whole Language and Balanced Literacy communities, fully aware that this exercise is arbitrary and idiosyncratic, without the very self-reflection I am decrying in others.

To what end, then? To detail the idiocy of the debate because there is no real debate unless it exhibits all the qualities Carl Hendrick explores. If there is no reckoning with the decades-long failure to accept the instructional implications of reading research from those who continue to match mistaken ideas with recommended practice, then this closed view of the reading world will remain the dominant one in many of our schools to the detriment of the children we teach.

Is there anyone in our profession more humble than Anna Geiger (Reach All Readers), host of the Triple R Teaching podcast? She often speaks about her own evolution from Balanced Literacy to Structured Literacy and writes about it in the introduction to her book. She states:

I was taken aback by [Emily] Hanford’s condemnation of three-cueing (not to mention completely insulted by her use of the word “guess”), but I was also relatively sure that a journalist could not know more about how reading works than an experienced teacher. I planned to write a post refuting “At a Loss for Words,” point by point. On each of my daily walks, I tried to formulate what was sure to be a convincing rebuttal. But I never got very far: as it turned out, I didn’t know as much about how reading works as I thought I did. I began looking into the research myself. It didn’t take long to discover that Hanford was right.

Where are the Anna Geigers in this debate—the ones who understand that unexamined reading methods are not worth teaching?

I wish I had said what Carl Hendrick has said, but I’ve been far too timid to announce that what has been transformative for me can also translate into other people’s experiences. I have not expressed these sentiments (and certainly could never have done so as eloquently as he has) because I am influenced by my work with first and second graders, and I have been forced to buckle under the weight of all the barriers that can prevent my students from experiencing deep reading, beginning with their struggles to lift the words—those units of utility—off the page. Saying what Carl Hendrick has said, as much as I agree with him, feels like an act of disloyalty to my students.

For my intervention students who can’t read, they would gladly strike this deal: If we can’t have the full reading experience, then at least provide us with the fundamentals for decoding words so that we can benefit from their utility if not their ability to unify humanity. We’ll take John Stuart Mill over Albert Schweitzer.

My French and German classes in college were taught by an Englishwoman who was extremely proud of her English heritage and therefore absolutely appalled when a student in the class didn’t know Shakespeare’s nationality. I was intrigued by this situation and asked my Greek mother, a sixth-grade graduate in her mountain village, whether she knew what he didn’t. Her reply: What IS a Shakespeare?

I’ll tell you what a Shakespeare is. A Shakespeare is a symbol for the whole world of reading possibilities: shallow puns that exploit the utility of words and deep soliloquies that excavate what’s buried in the recesses of the mind—thoughts and emotions that are discerning and daring. Unfortunately, too many of our students suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and never cross the decoding threshold into Narnia, Neverland, and Númenor—or any of the other brave new worlds beckoning to be explored. They stay stuck with that stubborn symbol that they simply cannot decipher.

Carl Hendrick has delivered a beautifully-worded missive with a sonorous undertone that acts as a wake-up call to all of us. Unintentionally, he has also reminded me that we continue to betray students who will be forgotten through no fault of their own. We are choosing to leave them behind because we are blind to the barriers we’ve constructed that have barred them from stepping over the threshold into literacy.

We cannot continue to ignore or minimize our obligation to these children. We cannot allow the humility of the page to succumb to the certainty of an intractable stance. This is the stuff of Shakespeare. Swords out!

Always striving to make sense—please let me know when I fail.