Teach Reading No Matter AI
Why Teaching Reading Matters Now More Than Ever Before
This month’s essay is about teaching reading in the age of AI.
The Little Thing: Knowing how to read
What is Reading?
Several months ago, I was at a meeting of teachers that was focused on how teachers should teach reading. The question we discussed was what role the teachers’ union should have in the promotion of different approaches, or instructional methods, for teaching reading in our public school system. Which approach is better? What should the union be promoting?
My position was then, and is now, that all teachers in British Columbia are already required teach the provincial curriculum, a curriculum that is already centred on teaching reading, and that therefore the union’s job is simply to protect professionalism and to promote public education for all.
The curriculum, and the system, are already built for one thing: To ensure that students learn to read. This means that there is nothing new for the union, for the profession, or for the public schools to do. Teachers already teach reading. Reading already is the heart of public education. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. This means that our focus is on maintaining a system already in place to do what’s required for society to pass reading on to the next generation.
Public schools exist to teach reading, and the teaching profession exists, in totality, for the promotion of universal literacy for a democratic society. Given this, it’s no surprise that public schools, and public school teachers, do a good job at ensuring that reading instruction remains paramount to what we do. It is why our jobs exist. We teachers teach reading. All public school teachers do this.
At this meeting, which got a bit heated (as most discussions on something as important as reading are apt to get from time to time), a colleague pointedly asked me this question: How do you define reading? (My answer then is not the point of this essay, so I will share a slightly different answer to one I gave then.)
What is reading? At its most basic level, reading is decoding and writing is encoding. Reading and writing are codes of codes. First, there is the code of spoken language. Phonemes and other spoken symbols, and sometimes gestured or otherwise conveyed messages, map to meaning (also a symbolic system). This is spoken language. On top of meaning and language there are letters, and other written symbols, that encode spoken language into written language. To decode this, you read. To encode it, you write.
But reading is also so much more than what it is at its most basic level. Reading is more than the meaning encoded into it. That’s because to “read” is to utilize the technology of written language in ways that go beyond simple coding and encoding. Reading is the practical use of this technology to gain power, to use power, and to have the power of the written word, the written narrative, the rule of law, the recording of data, the production and transmission of knowledge. It is the means by which thinking is made visible, by which time travel is possible, and by which we can read the minds of others.
The Regenerative Power of Reading
Society is regenerated one child at a time. Each time a child learns to read, society is passed from one generation to the next. Each time a child learns to read, the means by which we survive, through society, is carried on. Reading is survival. It is survival for the individual, for the society, for adaptive growth, for social technology, and for everyone now and into the future. Social and individual growth of human society is only possible, in the form of society we have today, through the transmission of reading.
When a society fails to teach reading, that society dies. That is why reading is taught on a universal, practical, and constant basis in our society. It is also why there are kindergartens. Why there are libraries. Why primary schools exist. Why high schools exist. Why there are colleges, universities, trade schools, and academies. Why there are journalists, scholars, publishers, authors, speech writers, marketing departments, and schools of business and management. (And also, why militaries invest so much in the advanced literacy of their specialists, lawyers and judges, and officers.)
Do you want to be powerful? Then learn to read. Do you want to have medical care in your old age? Then be sure that today’s children all learn to read. Do you want to live in a democracy, with the rule by law, and to have your rights respected? Then make sure that literacy is universal, starting with every young child in your society learning to read. Reading must be taught and retaught, passed from one generation to the next. Carried forward, through education, for its power to maintain and for the promise of reading to be realized.
Universal Reading Requires Public Education
The purpose of public education is to teach reading on a universal basis. Every level of public schooling, from preschool to high school (and beyond), serves one basic function: To teach reading, by passing literacy forward from one generation to another.
First, students learn to decode and encode, which must take place in the context of meaning. Young children learn narrative structure, the connection between language and meaning, the features of text, and the conventions of our literary tradition, at an early age. Decoding and encoding only make sense in the context of meaning. Reading between the lines, learning about text, context, subtext, and metatext starts young. Rhythm, tone, voice, resonance, style, beat, and meaning are as essential as coded connections between words on a page and words in the ear.
Second, students learn to play with reading. Song, dance, movement, story, image, voice, and meaning combine with language, word, symbol, convention, and other elements of literature. We play to create, to emerge, to empower, to know, to share, and to exchange through written language, which is always closely beside its spoken form. Metaphor, simile, allegory, irony, etc. stand right next to language, right next to thought, right next to meaning.
Third, students learn to construct with reading. To build ideas, to build stories, to build themselves as masters of reading. Students learn to create ideas, to construct knowledge, to build components, to see patterns, and to connect and reflect through reading. Students learn to write, to think, to make thought visible.
First. Second. Third. Students do all three, at once, every step of the way. As babies, as toddlers, as preschoolers, as kindergarteners, as children, teens, young adults, adults, and as elders. Repeat first. Repeat second. Repeat third. And then keep doing this all (over and over) during your entire life (for as long as you can).
The purpose of public education is to provide the social space for literacy to be supported on a universal and accessible basis. Schools provide all students with text-rich places, with libraries and book rooms, with computer labs and iPad carts, with storytellers, pencils, and papers. Schools provide equal access to crayons and markers, scissors, laser printers, 3D printers, and all the other tools to craft stories, to share narratives, to read books, to hear poems, to sing and chant, to dance and drum, and to celebrate our literary (spoken and written) heritages together.
In the Age of AI: Just Keep Reading, Just Keep Writing
If reading dies, society dies. If writing dies, society dies. While automated reading and automated writing, done by AI, will serve functions that will prove powerful and useful in many ways, neither form of automation is people who can read, people who can write. This is why reading and writing cannot be replaced by AI. People must be able to do both to be literate, or to have access to the power of language by means of literacy.
This is why AI, a new tool in the literacy toolbox, cannot replace reading and writing in public schools or in the minds of young people. Students, to read and write, must read and write. And that is why, even with the advent of AI chatbots, students still read, still write, and still learn how to use all of the tools available to them (including AI) to gain mastery over, and access to, the power of reading and writing for life.