Fundamental Mistakes In The Way Schools Taught Us To Read

The average person reads less than one whole book a year! Ninety five percent of all books purchased, says one publisher, don't get read past the first chapter! The rare person who does finish a book usually takes a few days if not a few weeks to do so and retains but about 10-15% of its content! Why? What is wrong with the way we were taught to read?

Well let us look at how we were taught to read. You were five or six years old and in school, and you were taught vocabulary and pronunciation, and then you were told reading was repetitive pronunciation to yourself. In other words, you take a word, you learn it, pronounce it, learn how to spell it, learn how to say it, and of course, learn what it means. We were then tested and asked to stand up in front of the teacher and the class, and read aloud to everyone in the room; and of course, at that point in our aspiring careers we were all totally comfortable with public speaking. Right? No, wrong!

I mean if you think about it, most little children are not afraid to do new things, not afraid to take on new challenges. They are incredibly adventurous. Yet, in front of that class reading new and unfamiliar words, you've got teeth coming in, teeth going out - you're naturally going to mispronounce a word. What did everyone do when you mispronounced that word? Well if you were in the same class I was, they all laughed at you to the point where you said something to the effect of " I do not want to have to do that again!"

If you think about it for a moment what happened was that you learned to read and had stress simultaneously. The next day, you began to read in class; the stress comes back. Reading, Stress, Reading, Stress, Reading, Stress. What became conditioned with reading? Stress! Big Mistake by people who probably meant well.

So you need to learn to do something different. You need to learn to have fun while you read. Have fun and then read. Have fun and then read. What do you think becomes conditioned with reading? You got it... Fun... for for adults "pleasure."

Now, going back to how we learned to read, you are again five or six years old. Not only do you learn to get stressed while reading, but it gets reinforced. In second grade, in third grade, in fourth grade it becomes a pattern and a habit.

While we probably agree that most 5 or 6 years old kids are incredibly bright, incredibly perceptive, their ability to articulate is relatively limited. It's simply because the verbal part of their brain and their vocabulary is relatively limited at that age. However, this doesn't mean there's anything wrong with them.

Well, the reality is it doesn't mean their brains possess insufficient capability. It just means they can't articulate. Now if you think about how we learn to read by having to pronounce the words, we were using that ability to articulate which at 5 or 6 years old wasn't fully developed. And so what happened is we had to use the small undeveloped part of our brain to read with and because we had to practice it every day, well it became habitualized. We developed and got conditioned into a certain pattern of behavior that conditioned us to use a small part of our brain when we read. It is very sad, I know.

This is in fact what happened to us and in fact still happens to kids today. But you know the reality is that's the way they taught reading for the last few hundred years and in my view it doesn't look like they're going to change very much in the next few hundred either. And I don't think that's because of any intentional bad effort by administrators, teachers or schools. They're probably doing the best with what they knew worked for them at one time. But if you want to learn a new way, you must believe first that you are capable of much more and, second, be willing to learn it. Here it is in the Reading Genius® system, The Planet's Most Powerful Reading Course!