Sixty-thousand mollusks. It’s hard to conceive of that many invertebrates in one location. That is, however, the number of mollusks discovered at the home of famed epistemologist Jean Piaget after his death in 1980.

Sixty thousand octopi, snails, slugs and mussels. Who would have thought that this man would still have such a profound influence on the instruction of our human children? A man who did not have a background in teaching or reading instruction.

No one can deny Piaget’s influence on the field of cognitive developmental psychology, but Piaget never intended his theories on child development to translate into a teaching approach. Constructivism is more than just a retooling of Piaget’s theories, it is a many-tentacled pedagogical beast that holds sway over much of our educational landscape. It is the primary doctrine of teacher training programs, and it lives and breathes in our classrooms.

However, as an approach to teaching, constructivism is preventing thousands upon thousands of students from learning how to read.

A constructivist classroom is really one marked by supposedly student-centric learning — we hear phrases such as inquiry based learning or inductive reasoning — and the teacher is a guide, not an instructor. Providing direct instruction on how to master unnatural skills (like reading) is seen as antithetical to the development of the “natural,” or “whole child,” a phrase that has found widespread use in and out of the classroom.

As explained in the brilliant “Deconstructing Constructivism” by Jon Gustafson, the most persistent flaw in constructivism is that “it was created as a theory to explain how an individual learns, and has since been widely misinterpreted as a teaching pedagogy that is characterized by minimal guidance and individual interests” (Gustafson, 2019).

This misinterpretation has grown and evolved into a fact- and science-resistant behemoth that includes the notion that children will teach themselves the foundational skills of reading and math with minimal teacher support. In reading, constructivism leads to guessers, not readers. In assuming foundational skills will come to a child through osmosis, or simply by being around books, we are setting up children from a young age to resort to guessing and reorganizing text to compensate for their inability to directly translate the words on the page.

The research tells us that reading starts with our understanding of sounds and then moves to print, not the other way around, and the whole language approach that grew out of constructivism is naturally backward to how we learn as a species. We are, after all, not born knowing how to read 5,000-year-old Phoenician representations of sounds (aka letters).

These practices exist in the very popular programs such as Reading Recovery, Fountas and Pinnell, and Lucy Calkins’ Units of Study — the latter two of which were recently savaged in reviews by EdReports as being unfit for use with children. Strategies such as guessing based on context and picture clues is why, according to the National Assessment of Progress data, 64% of our eighth graders are functionally illiterate — as well as 32-36 million adults.

It begs the question, why is the work of a wunderkind in the field of mollusk anatomy from the 1930s and 40s continuing to influence how children are taught to read in the present? 

Horace Mann, the father of the American public school system, a noted constructivist, referred to children learning letters as “an abomination” and “ghastly apparitions.” Mann believed in whole word instruction over sounding out words because, as Professor E.D. Hirsch explains in “The Knowledge Deficit,” “romantic ideas, especially the idea that nature is best, influenced his belief that the best way to teach early reading [was whole language] … those who formed our current ways of approaching education and many other matters, believed that the natural cannot lead us astray.”

The practices found in the notably inappropriate programs such as Units of Study and Fountas and Pinnell were built into the very fabric of our schools. That the idea of concrete knowledge being framed as the opposite of thought, rather than the basis of it, is inherent in our education system is probably why so many students fall through the oft-mentioned cracks. 

The effect of not teaching reading properly at a young age means a child will read as slowly as one of Piaget’s 60,000 pet mollusks. In some sense, without evidence-based instruction, a child could be more like a mollusk in that they will withdraw from the learning process and build a shell to protect themselves from the emotional anguish of feeling less-than in the classroom. 

Ben Tobin lives in Williamsburg. 

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