There's been a comment on an earlier posting here about the need (or not depending on what you think) for the minority of children who don't take naturally to reading to be made to learn it good and early. I guess a lot of readers of this this I don't copy and paste it in a new posting, and it is worth reading. So here it is, from Fritz:

People who cannot yet read, can still learn. With access to the world, to TV and computer and books on tape, and a helper to read things to them when they want to know something that needs reading, pre-reading children are learning all the time. And when they do start to read, it comes fast and furious.

Perhaps the 20% who have trouble learning to read, would be able to sort it out by their early teens (or earlier) if they are not analyzed and labeled as having a particular sort of difficulty early-on. I've seen children learn to read, with only the help they ask for in learning about how letters sound and what a word says, and being read to when they want to be, much later than they would have to learn in order to be accepted as 'normal' in a school. I suspect such children would be labeled challenged in some way when they confuse d and b and p and q, and can't remember some of the letters' sounds. If not made to feel bad about not knowing these things, if encouraged with a 'you'll get it, in your own time', and helped to learn about these things in ways that make sense to them, I suspect that most children will be reading when they are ready. Maybe some of those problems are caused by pushing children to read too early, before they are ready. Any problem will become apparent and solutions can be found.

Anyhow, that is an alternative vision to the 'compelled literacy' one.

This is what I want to be true. But I guess "early teens" will sound to many like an awfully long time to wait. And what of those children who don't have all that "help" they're going to need if they can't read for themselves?

If a few Nobel Prize winners were to email me with the story of how they only started reading at fourteen, that might ease my mind.