My visiting eight-month-old granddaughter crawl-flopped past the teething toys to chew on the metal leg of the coffee table. "Try the pink penguin," my daughter said. "Teething is its entire raison d'etre."
Caroline doesn't know the meaning of raison d'etre. Yet.
In the airport, a man told my daughter, Allison, she should read to Caroline.
"Yes," said Allison. She is a literary agent.
"Reading is very important," the man said.
"Yes," said Allison. Caroline enjoys chewing on books too.
Educated parents don't just read aloud to their children, writes Natalie Wexler on Minding the Gap. Without even thinking about, they expose them to conversations about the wider world, building general knowledge and vocabulary. It's like sprinkling the "fairy dust" that enables children to fly.
If parents can't do that, teachers can, she writes. But "schools need a coherent, content-rich curriculum beginning in the early grades" and "teaching techniques backed by cognitive science that enable all students to understand, analyze, and retain that content."
Wexler also is an advocate of teaching students how to write, explicitly, "beginning at the sentence level, and to embed writing activities in content across the curriculum."
Most schools don't do this, she writes. Achievers are "kids who are highly motivated and well-organized, or who have parents with the resources to provide the support they need," while "the others are usually left to flounder."
I wuz deprived as a child; my father taught me to read comic books and cereal boxes. Oh, the humanity!
Two words: Core Knowledge.
It would be a great start.