Buckhorn, MO

3/9/92

Sandy asked me to talk to you about my view of the importance of parental involvement in children’s learning and the importance of keeping kids in school. Those are subjects close to my heart, for a variety of reasons, some of them personal, some of them professional. I’m not going to say much about staying in school -- not because I don’t think it important. I do think it important. I was a high school dropout and I know how hard it is to make up for the loss. But the other part is even more important and is, in fact, one of the determiners of whether kids will drop out.

As I said, I dropped out. Unlike a lot of people who drop out, I was able to repair most of the damage because I had something going for me that more and more kids aren’t getting. I had a good solid early education, whihc included a love of reading, a strong ability to read, a good grounding in analytic and analogical reasoning, and, in general, an awareness of the value of learning. Most of these things were reinforced and encouraged by the schools I attended -- to some degree or another -- but I have to give most of the credit for them to my mother.

And that’s the point I want to dwell on most today. I was a mediocre student at best and a borderline juvenile delinquent. From the time I was 11 or 12, my whole approach to school was enduring it until I could get out. But somewhere along the line I developed a respect for learning and a love of reading that were able to survive my own efforts to sabotage my life. And those are the important things one learns both in school and during the preschool years -- the abstract concepts and general principles; not the specific facts, but how to think about facts, what to do with facts.

When I think about my childhood, I don’t have a lot of real specific memories of real specific things like a lot of people seem to have. I recall images: pictures of incidents and usually some kind of feelings about them. Like the time my sister got burned really badly. I don’t remember who said what to whom or the specific date. But I remember my mother heading for the kitchen door with a fiery skillet in her hands. I can see the door standing open and feel the cold air coming in, but mostly I feel the panic, the fear. I also remember such pictures of summer days and the August heat. But one that stands out most in my memories, the one that is my fondest and warmest and most cherished memory, is what must be a composite memory. It is evening and there is not much light in the room, lamplight I think. My mother is sitting in a chair surrounded by and swarmed over by my brothers and I and it is warm and peaceful. And she is reading to us from Mother West Wind. And that is where I believe the me that stands before you tonight came from.

I grew up associating reading and learning with that peace and happiness and security. And, I believe that to be the greatest gift anyone ever gave me.

I meet and deal with about 200 students a year. And believe it or not, I get kids in my classes who literally cannot read. Most of them don’t like to read and read poorly when they do read. They know all the latest songs and wear all the latest fashions and can talk for hours about this video and that movie. But they can’t write a complete sentence and don’t know a passive verb from a nuclear missile. They’re not stupid kids. Not many stupid people get into college. But these kids, by the thousands, do not love learning. They perceive college as a hurdle they have to jump to get that wonderful, high paying job they all think a degree alone will get them. Books are things they sometimes can’t avoid buying and sometimes even have to read in order to pass a test. But they are not things they pick up willingly or approach with enthusiasm. They don’t like to read because they aren’t good at it, and they aren’t good at because they haven’t been taught how. And, because they don’t read well, they also don’t write well or think well.

There have always been such people, but not in such numbers as there are today and seldom in college.

How did this happen? Dr. Jane Healy, in her book Endangered Minds , offers pretty convincing arguments that the primary cause is a terrible and pervasive and growing lack of parental involvement in their learning among all socioeconomic groups.

In the last few decades our world has changed dramatically. The economy has done a slow nosedive, forcing many families to have two wage earners. At the same time, attitudes toward divorce and marriage have changed so the number of single-parent homes has increased to the point that, now, the typical American family is a single-parent household headed by a working mother. To make matters worse, increasing numbers of these families live in poverty. And, even in those families in which two incomes are not required, the definition of what constitues a "necessary income" has changed. How can the kids have all those expensive clothes and cars and stereos if mom and dad don’t both work? If all that weren’t bad enough, decent childcare has become harder to afford and television has now invaded 90% of American households. According to the book, The Parental Leave Crisis published in 1988, the majority of kids today are left with babysitters or in childcare centers from the time they are two years old and commonly from two months old. That’s a fact, a sad fact, but an unavoidable fact. Don’t get me wrong: I am not opposed to day care. Neither am I opposed to both parents working. It is a condition that is a part of our lives and it is not going to change, so being opposed to it would be like being opposed to snow or tornadoes: pointless.

But, it is also a fact that those pre-school years are crucial times for language development. And it is a fact that language development is crucial to the development of problem-solving abilities. And it is a fact that both of these are best nurtured by the mother — that is not a gender thing; what it means is a full-time, primary care-giver. They can be done by the father, but less well. And they can be done by older siblings, but even less well. And they can be done by day-care attendants, but again, even less well. Studies have shown that, even in the best daycare centers, kids don’t get the kind of linguistic interaction that they need to develop their language and related mental skills. And, in fact, when care-givers speak a different language or dialect than the parents, as is often the case, the problems are even greater.

Now, it is going to snow when it darn well pleases instead of when we want it to. And tornadoes will hit when and where they want to. And mothers are going to have to continue working, whether we like it or not.

And that’s where you all come in. You are America’s front line troops because you can reach many of these children -- and more importantly, their parents -- before it’s too late.

You need to try to convey to the parents you come in contact with how crucial it is that they interact verbally with their children. Interact, not just "talk to." It is simply not enough to, for instance, read a story to a child. One must discuss the story with the child, perhaps using the illustrations as starting points for creative thinking ventures for the child, or encouraging the child to make-up alternative endings, or alternative sub-plots, and things of that nature -- creative interaction, not just rote listening and rote quizzing, but actual playful, creative interaction.

Think about what that means: it means one-on-one interaction with the child, the kind of thing the child cannot get in institutionalized daycares. It also means paying complete attention to the child, thinking and talking and reacting on the child’s level, things daycares cannot provide simply because they are institutions which have to concern themselves with profit-and-loss, with safety, and the like as much as, perhaps more than, they do with the kids’ development. In fact, the typical daycare center is nothing more than a miniature classroom with "learning activities" and kids kept busy at tables -- absolutely not the kind of environment pre-school children need if they are really going to learn.

And, unfortunately, that playful, creative interaction is the very last thing a working mother feels like doing after an eight- or ten-hour day on the job. It is so much easier to read Johnny and Susy a story, pull the blankets up over them and be done with it, or to pop on the television and let it do the job.

But neither of those things "do the job." The cold fact is that not only do these techniques not give the kids the linguistic interaction their developing minds need, they actually impede mental development. Kids need to be guided, taught how to interpret narrative situations, taught how to analyze problems, taught how to find appropriate solutions, etc. -- taught by interaction and by modelling by the primary care-giver, the mother. And if that foundation is not established in the formative years, the pre-school years, it is never going to be established. We have known for a long time, those of us who teach, that children who don’t read don’t like to read and that those who don’t like to read don’t write or think well. But recent studies are showing something even more chilling. That is that those same kids, once they get into school, aren’t able to learn to write well -- or read well -- or think well. They simply can’t learn to do those things as well as they could have if they had learned them earlier. A relatively simple analysis of the skyrocketing numbers of children who are being labelled Learning Disabled, especially dyslexic, will show that.

And the reason is that their primary care-givers missed the readiness boat. Kids need to learn when they’re ready, not when mommy has the energy to teach them, and not according to some daycare center’s activity schedule.

Human brains are busy places, especially in the early years. But, once they get ready to learn, they’ll learn what’s there to be learned. Thus, the two-year-old who is ready to learn some of the finer points of language will, if he or she is plopped down in front of the television set, learn that language is disjointed bits and pieces of imprecise fluff that is less important than the images that accompany it. And I’ll never be able to convince him or her differently.

Furthermore, there have been numerous studies in the last few years that indicate that even the much-acclaimed tv programs such as "Sesame Street" do more damage than they do good, partly because they present information indiscriminately, without regard to a child’s individual readiness, and partly because they teach kids to be passive listeners, but mainly because they so flood little minds with stimuli that those same little minds just shut off after a few minutes. After a few minutes of honks and beeps and squeaks and flashes of red and green and blue and shifts from this scene to that scene, from loud to soft, from music to pictures to words, those little minds just shut down: the stimuli literally start to just bounce off the cerebral cortex.

Television can’t replace mommy. And reading a story to a child is not the same of discussing a story with a child. And talking to a child is not the same as interacting with a child.

I don’t believe our world is going to change to the point that Ward and June Cleaver’s kind of family will ever become a reality. And I don’t believe that women are ever again going to want to spend their early adult lives as homebound babysitters, nor that they are going to be able to afford to if they do want to. Furthermore, I think that’s just fine. I believe in humans, whatever their gender, having the right to choose how they spend their lives.

But with that freedom -- or necessity, as the case may be -- comes a responsibility. If they are going to continue to have children, as I am sure they will, they are going to have to alter that part of their lives also. Children have to be taught. Period. Humans are not instinctual creatures like fish. We have to learn -- we have to learn how to walk, how to talk, how to think, how to interact; we have to learn everything. And we have to learn it from someone. And we have to learn it at the right times or we either won’t learn it at all or we’ll learn it improperly. Parents need to know that. They must do it right.

I am not a supporter of the Governor’s and the President’s push for parents as teachers. I believe that their motives are to get us off their backs and to convince us that they are actually doing something wonderful for education. What they want is for non-working mothers to come into the schools and cut out pictures for bulletin boards and help teachers supervise children on field trips. What the schools need is for the politicians and administrators and school boards and citizens’ groups to butt out and let teachers teach.

For parents to really be teachers, they simply need to spend "quality time" with their children, like my mother did -- reading to the kids in an atmosphere that is conducive to the children interacting with the stories, playing with kids with words, answering kids questions on the kids’ own levels, modelling intellectual behaviors, such as problem-solving, for the kids, talking with them, not to them.

And that is the message I hope you all will deliver. Parents are the first and most important educators. What you and I do cannot proceed without a base established by the parents. We cannot replace them, nor can we correct their mistakes. And, since the world isn’t likely to change back to what is was 50 years ago, those same parents have to adapt. We don’t need political band-aids and we don’t need buck-passing. What we need is for parents to realize that we can only take up where they leave off -- and what we can hope to do for their kids is absolutely dependent on what they’ve done. If they don’t prepare the ground for us, and in the right season, nothing we try to plant can grow. Now more than ever, when it takes a bachelor’s degree to get a job emptying bed pans, and when every combat soldier has to be computer literate, kids must be educated. And the crucial part of the education has to start at home. I hope you’ll tell them that.

Thank you.