Dumbing Down What Students Read Didn’t Make Them Any Smarter
Yesterday as today, what we call reading skills heavily influence academic achievement. They further influence the development of writing skills beyond the early years of schooling when writing is almost a transcription of a child's speech patterns. The development of reading skills, especially a reading vocabulary, and then writing skills depends largely on willing practice in reading. There are no silver bullets for a large reading vocabulary. Perhaps we can learn something by looking at what educators did at the turn of the 20th century and over the last century to keep students with a minimal interest in reading and studying engaged with schooling as compulsory education laws and prohibitions against factory work compelled most students to stay in high school — and still do.
The surge in high school enrollment at the turn of the 20th century — mainly to address the huge wave of immigration to our urban areas — led educators to make many changes to the high school curriculum as high schools were being built or expanded — in large part to accommodate the wide range of reading skills and student interests in grades 10-12. Several sinister theories have long been advanced to account for these changes (e.g., to sort out the children of an upper class or upper middle class from those who would become part of the workforce). The students attending newly formed or expanded high schools were not apt to be children of the wealthy but children of a broad middle class and immigrants. What and how could teachers in a high school or any secondary classroom teach if large numbers of students (but not all) in typically large classes couldn't read the textbooks and literary works assigned for their grade level?
