There Was Never a Golden Age. That Is Not the Defence Paul Thomas Thinks It Is.

These are further thoughts on my previous post at LINK. 

Paul Thomas asks whether “kids today can’t read” is a real crisis or, as Chris Ferguson suggests, a perennial gripe. His answer rests on two observations. Adults have always complained about the young. And nobody can point to a golden age when nearly all children left school able to read well.

Both can be granted. Neither answers the question that matters.

A complaint that recurs for a century is not automatically nostalgia. It may be a failure that was never fixed. The absence of a golden age is not evidence that the problem is imaginary. It may be evidence that the problem has never been solved.

Every decade the landlord repaints the ceiling, renames the stain, and publishes a new theory of moisture. There was never a year when the ceiling was dry. That is not proof the leak is a myth. It is proof nobody replaced the joint.

Reading instruction has had its repaintings: look-and-say, whole language, balanced literacy, structured literacy, the science of reading. New terminology, new programmes, new assessments, new explanations. Substantial numbers of children still leave school unable to read an unfamiliar word fluently and confidently. A stable failure rate after endless relabelling is what you get when a system treats a predictable share of non-readers as normal.

Travellers keep getting lost. Cartographers issue new editions, new legends, new colours. No edition puts the river where it is. “There was never a perfect old map” is true and useless. The error was copied forward.

Children are taught letter sounds inconsistently. They are told that b says “buh.” They are given rules full of exceptions, told to sound some words, memorise others, and guess at the rest. Some conclude that print does not make sense. Changing the name of the programme does not remove the extra syllable.

Poverty is real. It does not explain the child from a comfortable, educated home who still cannot read, or the child from a modest home who learns rapidly once the confusion is removed. A nation can prosper while leaving many children behind. That shows the country could afford the loss. It does not show those children were taught successfully.

The test does not require a golden age. Show one Grade 3 non-reader who was taught the sounds without “buh” — consistently, without being told to guess — and who still could not read. Until that child is produced, a century of renamed failure is not nostalgia. It is a system that learned to accept avoidable failure, and then called the acceptance realism.