On Learning to Read: A Hard Look at Teaching Reading

Although not intended as such, Bruno Bettelheim's and Karen Zelan's book, On Learning to Read, could certainly be viewed as a companion piece to Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment. In the latter study, Bettelheim probes the ways in which the themes of folk and fairy tales address the inner life of the child—his or her inner turmoil and conflicts—and the ways in which the resolution of these tales offers hope and the possibility of mastery over one's life. In On Learning to Read, the inner life of the beginning reader is, once again, under scrutiny.

The organizing perspective from which Bettelheim and Zelan approach their subject is a psychoanalytic one.¹ That is, many of the insights that are brought to bear on the subject derive from fundamental, psychoanalytical premises on which our understanding of the inner life and its progressive development is based. However, although there are instances of interpretive heavy-handedness, the book is not confined by its psychoanalytic perspective, as might be expected in lesser hands. Rather, the reverse is true: the book accumulates meaning and resonance as it proceeds, so that it tends to exceed the boundaries of the theme, thereby urging the reader toward a consideration of universal concerns in the matter of growing and learning—which, after all, constitutes the core of human experience.

Bettelheim's and Zelan's thesis is that children's misreadings (substitution of one word for another, as in "Tigger" for "Tiger"), or blockings (complete breakdown or inability to go on reading), more often than not do not constitute a problem in decoding—a faulty perception of phonemes, a weakness in the ability to sound out initial consonants, and the like, but rather indicate a strong, personalized response to the meaning of what is being read. They view misreadings in very much the same terms that Freud viewed slips-of-the-tongue—unconscious changes in meaning to diffuse, avoid, or comment on conflicts aroused by strong, personal associations brought on by the content of what is being read. They maintain (and their contentions are documented by many anecdotal examples from their field work) that when making an apparent error in decoding, the child often becomes discouraged, angry, or depressed when his teacher corrects or "teaches" as if the problem were merely a technical one, a matter of decoding separated from meaning. According to the authors' findings, a recognition and acceptance by the teacher of the child's error as personal and meaningful rather than cognitive, frequently leads to a spontaneous correction of the error or an ability to read the blocked word without the usual interventions. As the authors point out, at least part of the explanation for this lies in the sense of reciprocity the child experiences when accepted and recognized as a whole person by his or her teacher. This acceptance enables the child to put away his or her personalized experience of reality—i.e., the distortion of the word as written in order to accommodate a pressing inner reality—and attend to the objective task of decoding correctly, the task set for the child by the teacher. The child then comes away nourished: the meaning with which he or she invested the text has been recognized and viewed sympathetically, and he or she has been freed to proceed to the mastery of the external task, which once again reinforces a sense of self-worth because the child then feels both recognized and competent.

What is particularly interesting about all of this is that the array of examples of this type of positive exchange between teacher and child makes it clear that the child did, of course, recognize the word perfectly well, and that it was precisely that recognition and what it aroused that necessitated the often ingenious substitution or outright blocking.

Among the many instances of this dynamic provided by the authors, the following is typical:

In the opinion of his ambitious parents, an eight-and-a-half-year-old boy was not doing well enough academically, since he learned more slowly than had...