David Boulton, the creator of the Children of the Code project, captured this phenomenon perfectly when he noted that ten times the number of kids who have innate biological learning difficulties have learning difficulties that are a consequence of what they learned. As Boulton put it:
"The biggest obstacle to healthy learning is learning – we can learn in ways that disable our learning. Unhealthy learning harms, injures or maladaptively constrains how well we can on-going-ly learn and stunts or disables our learning from extending into new dimensions."
When we teach letters with extraneous sounds, we are building an unhealthy cognitive infrastructure. We are building a foundation that actively works against ongoing learning.
A Message to the Academics
It is time to stop letting PhDs judge our literacy systems based on the 10% of resilient brains that managed to guess their way out of bad teaching.
The 20% of children who shut down and leave school illiterate do not have broken hardware. They are running a corrupted operating system that we forced into their heads. They didn't fail because they lack intelligence; they failed because they were too honest with the broken data they were given.
To my readers: Look at your own children or students. How many of them are currently white-knuckling their way through reading, dragging the heavy baggage of extraneous "uh" sounds behind them? Have you witnessed a highly curious child completely shut down because the phonics math didn't add up? Let's discuss in the comments below.
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