Thread by @TheReadingApe

Much of the resistance to early schooling seems to be intertwined with the concept of reading readiness which became prevalent after Dolch and Bloomster’s (1937) study and Huey's (1902) recommendation that if a child were unable to read a text then it should not be read...

https://twitter.com/MadeUpTeacher1/status/1325440258595549184

‘Its very difficulty is the child’s protection against what it is as yet unfitted for,’ (p.57).

‘Delay as a teaching technique’ (Anderson,1952) developed into common educational parlance with the belief that any reading difficulties encountered by the age of seven would be resolved by cognitive maturation.

The age of seven as a threshold dovetailed with the accessing of Piaget’s (1952) concrete operations stage and tallied with Dolch and Bloomster’s (1937) observations that children with a mental age below that of seven were unable to match printed words to spoken words.

However, Rayner et al. (2012) question the validity of reading readiness as a biological construct arguing that if this were the case, children would begin reading instruction across the world at a similar age.

This is not the case, they argue, with some cultures not starting until seven with others beginning at five and with no consistency across English speaking nations.

Vaessen et al.(2010)in their study of Hungarian, Dutch and Portuguese children did not find effects of age that were independent of years of instruction.The idea that lack of cognitive maturation is at the heart of reading difficulties does not seem to be supported by studies.

Anecdotal evidence (very wary of this) of children not attending school during pandemic lockdown does not seem to suggest that the amount of play increased particularly in areas of social deprivation. The gap between richer and poorer children appears to have widened.

Informal learning through play may (like whole language reading instruction) be a very effective method of maintaining Bordieu's (2002) Habitus.