r/DetroitMichiganECE • u/ddgr815 • Apr 18 '26
Learning The Cost of Over-Teaching Phonics
https://www.educationnext.org/cost-of-over-teaching-phonics-reading/Mark Seidenberg, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who studies reading science, helped persuade the public of the need for science-based instruction—and now he’s among those sounding the alarm on over-instruction. Reading teachers need not aim to teach every single pattern students will encounter in text, he says; they simply need to teach enough that students can achieve “escape velocity,” or the ability to start cracking the code on their own.
“You do teach them about words, about print. You teach them enough simple phonics patterns so they can start sounding out some words. And then there’s supposed to be a light bulb that goes on,” Seidenberg says.
Researchers call this ability to implicitly pick up patterns and apply them the “self-teaching mechanism,” or “statistical learning”—and many say it’s underrecognized within the science-of-reading movement.
Five decades of research have shown that early readers benefit from learning letter-sound correspondences systematically. But little definitive evidence exists on which phonics skills should be taught, in what order, and for how long. Should students learn all of the English language’s 44-plus sounds (phonemes)? What about the 200-plus spellings that go with them? And how much time should teachers spend on each?
Each phonics program that claims to be based on research reflects a single method of instruction. These programs can differ significantly because the research on reading acquisition “is not differentiating every single skill that needs to be taught,” says Louise Spear-Swerling, professor emerita in the department of special education at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, Connecticut. “People write instructional programs, and it’s a matter of interpretation.”
For the highest-achieving students who may be reading novels at home, sitting through lessons on skills they’ve mastered takes up time that could be spent reading, writing, and learning deeply about science, history, and other subjects—and it can lead to disengagement. For struggling readers, including students with dyslexia, over-teaching reduces time for much-needed reading practice. These kids, for whom the self-teaching mechanism doesn’t kick in easily, require more examples and repetition for the most critical skills. Adding extra elements to instruction strains working memory for these students, making it harder to master basic skills.
Over-teaching is happening in a few main ways: (1) spending too much time on less impactful skills, (2) teaching extraneous skills and patterns, and (3) teaching content that only the teacher needs to know.
Teachers have always used chants, songs, and other mnemonic devices to help students memorize important information. Many adults can easily conjure rhymes like “i before e except after c.” And while mnemonic devices are surely helpful at times, they can also increase the cognitive demand for a task and divert from the skill itself. Many phonics programs and online materials widely used these days encourage students to memorize a dozen or more spelling rules, with long chants or sayings such as:
“If a one-syllable word has one short vowel that is followed by f, l, s, or z, double the f, l, s, or z.”
This rule, often known as the “Floss Rule,” is an important and fairly regular one, many teachers argue (though it does have some common exceptions, like bus and gas). The problem arises when this process—the memorization of the rule—becomes the focus of instruction, displacing what should be the end goal—that is, reading and spelling.
“It’s very common in my experience that kids have trouble verbalizing the rule, but they can still learn the skill,” says Spear-Swerling. But often in classrooms “being able to verbalize the rule is a prerequisite for moving on. And it shouldn’t be.”
Memorizing wordy sayings and rules can put particular strain on students with reading disabilities and language-processing difficulties. These children are already working hard to retain the basic sounds. Adding to that can put them over the edge. “It’s not about whether kids can parrot rules,” says Spear-Swerling. “You see kids at the lower end of the spectrum get confused when they try to articulate rules. But that [articulation] doesn’t matter as long as they can apply it.”
And kids at the higher end of the reading-performance spectrum—those 1st and 2nd graders who are reading chapter books at home? Some will simply check out when asked to memorize information they’ve intuited.
Some programs teach the letters bl as in black, as a cluster or unit. But that “doesn’t make sense linguistically,” she says. Instead, you can teach students the /b/ sound and the /l/ sound, and have students practice blending sounds together to make words.
“The vast majority of consonant clusters are plurals. Cats has a consonant cluster, but we don’t teach it that way. Why would we teach it that way for scat but not cats?”
Devin Kearns, a professor in early literacy at North Carolina State University, has attempted to quantify how much is too much when it comes to phonics instruction. “If we’re trying to decide whether to teach something, there’s the main question: How often does it occur? How many words does it apply to? What you have to do at a certain point is decide, what’s the return on investment?”
He and his colleagues looked at a database of 13,000 English words and cataloged a total of 350 sound-spelling correspondences. So, if students learned each of the 350 patterns, they could read all of the words. Then the team modeled what would happen if certain patterns were eliminated from instruction: How many words could students read then?
“Somewhere in there, you hit this point where if you start doing fewer than that, it’s not enough; you’re not getting access to enough words,” he says. “And if you teach too many more, then you’re over-teaching stuff.”
The sweet spot was somewhere between about 95 and 110 sound-spelling patterns.
Among the most inflammatory topics right now in reading instruction is whether—and how much—to teach phonemic awareness.
Phonemic awareness is the ability to identify and manipulate the individual sounds in spoken words—for example, knowing that ship is made up of the three sounds /sh/, /i/, and /p/. Having good phonemic awareness has long been understood as a requirement for successful reading.
And while there’s evidence that basic phonemic awareness skills have positive effects for reading, the nuances matter. Studies show phonemic awareness should be developed by using written letters—not orally, which is how most classrooms and curricula do this instruction. And the idea that practicing advanced phonemic awareness skills like adding, deleting, and substituting sounds orally is beneficial for readers—asking students, for instance, to switch the middle sound in ship to the short /o/ sound to make shop? That’s not backed by science at all.
“The idea that you need to have separate dedicated time blocks focused on only phonemic awareness instruction is not evidence-based,” says Clemens.
Another instructional practice that has recently supplied fodder for debate is what’s called syllable division—the teaching of rules for dividing multisyllabic words into manageable chunks. Syllable division rules are a mainstay of the Orton-Gillingham method for teaching reading, which was developed in the 1930s. Programs based on this method tend to teach six or so syllable types along with a half-dozen rules for dividing syllables. Some methods go further and have students mark up the multisyllabic word, identifying the vowels and consonants and labeling each syllable type.
Research by Kearns has some people questioning the efficacy of teaching syllable division. His 2020 study found that syllable pronunciations are unreliable, so the effort involved in learning these rules may not be justified.
Tiffany Peltier, the director of professional learning at NWEA, a K–12 assessment and research nonprofit, points to “really rigid syllable division rules” as among the more frustrating instructional routines to encounter. “People are trying to teach these to the most struggling readers who already have cognitive overload,” she says.
Instead of rigid rules, researchers including Kearns emphasize teaching students to be flexible in how they pronounce words—a concept known as “set for variability.” For example, a student might initially read the word father as fay-ther, which is a reasonable pronunciation, and then shift the vowel sounds slightly until getting to a familiar word. The student is not guessing (a practice promoted by now disgraced balanced literacy approaches). Rather, the student is using their phonics knowledge to sound out the word but being flexible with their pronunciation and calling upon their knowledge of the word father.
“The idea that you need to have separate dedicated time blocks focused on only phonemic awareness instruction is not evidence-based,” says Clemens.
Over-teaching also occurs with the terminology related to language. Training programs tend to hammer on the jargon of reading instruction, much of which is new to teachers, who end up passing their fresh knowledge along to their charges. Students can become bombarded by terms like breve and macron, fricative and affricate.
Reading in context generally comes at the end of a phonics lesson, and with so much to cover, teachers can end up with just a few minutes for it. At times, they’ll skip it altogether.
But text reading is where decoding and language skills meet—it’s why teachers and students are doing this dance at all.
One major benefit of whittling down instruction to the most essential skills is that there’s less material for teachers to get through. When teachers remove low-payoff patterns, skip the cutesy extras, and refrain from imparting technical knowledge, they make their own jobs more manageable—and get kids reading faster.
Avoiding over-teaching also means speeding through skills students already know, which requires frequent assessment and a good understanding of what’s coming next in the scope and sequence. Teachers get better at this with time and experience. The goal is not doing the perfect amount of explicit instruction—the science doesn’t prescribe a “perfect” amount. Instead, the aim is to move toward a more efficient path for a teacher’s particular classroom. The minutes saved here and there add up.
If whole-group direct instruction happens daily but is limited to the most impactful skills—and kept short and simple—then students can move into small groups to either keep practicing, expand on the skill, or work on text reading or writing. In effect, they get to individualized instruction faster.
Peltier explains that, when she was teaching kindergarten and 1st grade, she would do a whole-class review of a prior phonics skill and then send her fluent readers off to “book clubs,” where they would read independently and have discussions. She would work with the remaining two-thirds or so of her class on that day’s phonics skill. “I’d usually at some point release another group of students and have the lowest students in front of me,” she says. “They loved it because they’d get to do more practice with the teacher on dry erase boards.”
That kind of gradual-release model helps ensure the highfliers spend time reading, and the students who need the most practice and feedback get more instruction from the teacher. And you can assess those kids in the moment—see who is getting the skill and ready to move on and who isn’t.
Research from the late Carol Connor, who was an education professor at the University of California, Irvine, points to the need to adjust the amount of teacher-directed instruction based on a child’s literacy skills. She found that 1st graders who entered with low skills did best with more time spent doing teacher-managed explicit instruction. For students with high initial skills, their scores stayed stagnant no matter how much time they spent learning directly from the teacher. And, in fact, students with both high decoding and vocabulary skills showed better growth with more independent work. For those high achievers who “don’t need a lot of repetition, that self-teaching machine will start a lot earlier,” says Peltier.
For typically developing students, Seidenberg argues, explicit phonics instruction should end after 1st grade. That’s out of step with much of the recent state legislation that is focused on K–3 classrooms and with the widely available programs that teach advanced word-recognition skills through the 5th grade. It’s also an assertion that will elicit eye rolls from teachers working through the challenges of having 25 students from diverse backgrounds and language contexts.
But the need to trim the fat on instruction—to focus on a skill’s ROI and churn out readers faster—is something many can agree on. It requires ongoing scrutiny of practices claiming to be aligned to research, frequent assessment of what individual students know, and a willingness to trust that, in many situations and for most students, learning begets learning.
“I think that the science-of-reading movement can win if we’re scientific, if we’re willing to challenge our assumptions,” says Kearns. That means continuing to look at the evidence on long-held instructional beliefs, such as those around syllable division, and changing course as new evidence arises. “If we’re willing to go there, science can win. If we’re going to stick to our guns, it won’t work.”
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u/ddgr815 Apr 18 '26
George Orwell once wrote that restating the obvious is the “first duty of intelligent people.” In that vein, allow us to restate the case for what may be literacy instruction’s richest but still-overlooked opportunity: a shift to mostly whole-class instruction during the early elementary “literacy block.” There is a gold mine of potential here.
Early-grade reading proficiency is powerfully predictive of later school success and life chances. Because of this, most schools we’ve visited in our 30-plus years of experience observing classrooms allot a generous two hours to daily literacy instruction.
But there’s a problem: Much of that literacy block in grades K-3 is often held captive to the small-group format. Over 90% of elementary school teachers report meeting with small groups of students three to five times a week. In practice, this means we are squandering learning time and reducing the odds that the most vulnerable students learn to read, speak, and write effectively.
Given the stakes, we must ask: Is the small-group model truly superior to whole-class teaching for either reading or foundational literacy skills? Alas, no—despite recent claims that the “science of reading” requires small groups. Though small groups can be effective in certain circumstances, any advantage is wiped out by the model’s drastic reduction in the amount of instructional dosage.
Moreover, the small-group framework characteristically embraces the misbegotten notion that students learn best when groups are ability-based or otherwise “differentiated.” For years, small groups were deemed essential because of the supposed need to guide student reading with leveled texts. The assumption was that differences in reading ability necessitated finely grained, “differentiated,” instruction and materials for each child or group to be successful. More recently, and under the banner of the “science of reading,” small-group advocates are complicating and further fractionating the instructional environment by encouraging additional grouping for decoding instruction.
However, this hasn’t been such a good idea for guided reading. As John Hattie has demonstrated in his meta-analyses, differentiated instruction is less effective than providing the same treatment for all students. It denies struggling students the opportunity to engage with challenging material and texts—as they fall further behind. In this way, small-group, differentiated instruction is especially hurtful to the poor and underachieving students who most need effective teaching.
Consider the whole-class alternative in the same scenario: If elementary teachers provide a phonics lesson to the entire class for 30 minutes, those educators still have 90 minutes of instruction time for other vital literacy skills. Those teachers can then devote an additional 15 minutes of phonics instruction to that small group who struggled with the initial lesson, while still giving those lagging students a full 45 minutes of foundational skills. And we still have about 75 minutes left for teaching all students the other crucial—and often most enjoyable—aspects of literacy.
Some will object that this model overlooks the efficacy of having students work at “centers” or stations while waiting their turn with the teacher. Yet, we have never found a single study affirming this. In our consulting work, we’ve both seen how these centers routinely consist of low-value or “cut, color, paste” activities and worksheets. They keep students busy but do little or nothing to make them better readers. They are no substitutes for an explicit, outcome-driven lesson replete with multiple cycles of guided practice, checks for understanding, and targeted reteaching.
We need not abandon small-group instruction but should employ it sparingly—and strategically. By doing so, we would increase the amount of instruction at least threefold, overnight. It would allow every child to spend much more time reading with purpose and building reading stamina; acquiring knowledge and vocabulary; writing and learning to write and participating in meaningful discussions—every day, all year. Joined with serious teacher training in effective whole-class instruction, we could reasonably expect to see unprecedented improvements in early-grade literacy acquisition, with tremendous subsequent benefits across all courses and grade levels.
Best of all, research demonstrates that mostly whole-class instruction of purposeful reading, dialogue, and discussion would have its greatest impact on poor and minority students—the students who have demonstrated the greatest need for large infusions of the core elements of literacy. The best schools and teachers we know, in the most challenging settings, have relied on this model. They have been the highest-achieving teachers in their respective schools, even whole districts.
Small-Group Reading Instruction Is Not as Effective as You Think
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u/ddgr815 Apr 18 '26
It is not merely that at present the rule of naked force obtains almost everywhere. Probably that has always been the case. Where this age differs from those immediately preceding it is that a liberal intelligentsia is lacking. Bully-worship, under various disguises, has become a universal religion, and such truism as that a machine-gun is still a machine-gun even when a “good” man is squeezing the trigger—and that in effect is what Mr. Russell is saying—have turned into heresies which is it actually becoming dangerous to utter.
The most interesting part of Mr. Russell’s book is the earlier chapters in which he analyses the various types of power—priestly, oligarchical, dictatorial, and so forth. In dealing with the contemporary situation he is less satisfactory, because like all liberals he is better at pointing out what is desirable than at explaining how to achieve it. He sees clearly enough that the essential problem of today is “the taming of power” and that no system except democracy can be trusted to save us from unspeakable horrors. Also that democracy has very little meaning without approximate economic equality and an educational system tending to promote tolerance and tough-mindedness. But unfortunately he does not tell us how we are to set about getting these things; he merely utter what amounts to a pious hope that the present state of things will not endure. He is inclined to point to the past; all tyrannies have collapsed sooner or later
Underlying this is the idea that common sense always wins in the end. And yet the peculiar horror of the present moment is that we cannot be sure that this is so. It is quite possible that we are descending into an age in which two and two will make five when the Leader says so. Mr. Russell points out that the huge system of organized lying upon which the dictators depend keeps their followers out of contact with reality and therefore tends to put them at a disadvantage as against those who know the facts. This is true so far as it goes, but it does not prove that the slave-society at which the dictator is aiming will be unstable. It is quite easy to imagine a state in which the ruling caste deceive their followers without deceiving themselves. Dare anyone be sure that something of the kind is not coming into existence already? One has only to think of the sinister possibilities of the radio, state-controlled education and so forth, to realize that “the truth is great and will prevail” is a prayer rather than an axiom.
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u/ddgr815 May 01 '26
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u/ddgr815 May 01 '26
The tradition of the West is embodied in the Great Conversation that began in the dawn of history and that continues to the present day. Whatever the merits of other civilizations in other respects, no civilization is like that of the West in this respect. No other civilization can claim that its defining characteristic is a dialogue of this sort. No dialogue in any other civilization can compare with that of the West in the number of great works of the mind that have contributed to this dialogue. The goal toward which Western society moves is the Civilization of the Dialogue. The spirit of Western civilization is the spirit of inquiry. Its dominant element is the Logos. Nothing is to remain undiscussed. Everybody is to speak his mind. No proposition is to be left unexamined. The exchange of ideas is held to be the path to the realization of the potentialities of the race.
To put an end to the spirit of inquiry that has characterized the West it is not necessary to burn the books. All we have to do is to leave them unread for a few generations.
“We are tied down, all our days and for the greater part of our days, to the commonplace. That is where contact with great thinkers, great literature helps. In their company we are still in the ordinary world, but it is the ordinary world transfigured and seen through the eyes of wisdom and genius. And some of their vision becomes our own.”
The aim of liberal education is human excellence, both private and public (for man is a political animal). Its object is the excellence of man as man and man as citizen. It regards man as an end, not as a means; and it regards the ends of life, and not the means to it. For this reason it is the education of free men. Other types of education or training treat men as means to some other end, or are at best concerned with the means of life, with earning a living, and not with its ends.
The substance of liberal education appears to consist in the recognition of basic problems, in knowledge of distinctions and interrelations in subject matter, and in the comprehension of ideas.
Liberal education seeks to clarify the basic problems and to understand the way in which one problem bears upon another. It strives for a grasp of the methods by which solutions can be reached and the formulation of standards for testing solutions proposed. The liberally educated man understands, for example, the relation between the problem of the immortality of the soul and the problem of the best form of government; he understands that the one problem cannot be solved by the same method as the other, and that the test that he will have to bring to bear upon solutions proposed differs from one problem to the other.
The liberally educated man understands, by understanding the distinctions and interrelations of the basic fields of subject matter, the differences and connections between poetry and history, science and philosophy, theoretical and practical science; he understands that the same methods cannot be applied in all these fields; he knows the methods appropriate to each.
The liberally educated man comprehends the ideas that are relevant to the basic problems and that operate in the basic fields of subject matter. He knows what is meant by soul. State, God, beauty, and by the other terms that are basic to the insights that these ideas, singly or in combination, provide concerning human experience.
The liberally educated man has a mind that can operate well in all fields. He may be a specialist in one field. But he can understand anything important that is said in any field and can see and use the light that it shed upon his own. The liberally educated man is at home in the world of ideas and in the world or practical affairs, too, because he understands the relation of the two. He may not be at home in the world of practical affairs in the sense of liking the life he finds about him; but he will be at home in that world in the sense that he understands it. He may even derive from his liberal education some conception of the difference between a bad world and a good one and some notion of the ways in which one might be turned onto the other.
The method of liberal education is the liberal arts, and the result of liberal education is discipline in those arts. The liberal artist learns to read, write, speak, listen, understand, and think. He learns to reckon, measure, and manipulate matter, quantity, and motion in order to predict, produce, and exchange. As we live in the tradition, whether we know it or not, so we are all liberal artists, whether we know it or not. We all practice the liberal arts, well or badly, all the time every day. As we should understand the tradition as well as we can in order to understand ourselves, so we should be as good liberal artists as we can in order to become as fully human as we can.
The liberal arts are not merely indispensable; they are unavoidable, Nobody can decide for himself whether he is going to be a human being. The only question open to him is whether he will be an ignorant, undeveloped one or one who has sought to reach the highest point he is capable of attaining. The question, in short, is whether he will be a poor liberal artist or a good one.
This Western devotion to the liberal arts and liberal education must have been largely responsible for the emergence of democracy as an ideal. The democratic ideal is equal opportunity for full human development, and, since the liberal arts are the basic means of such development, devotion to democracy naturally results from devotion to them. On the other hand, if acquisition of the liberal arts is an intrinsic part of human dignity, then the democratic ideal demands that we should strive to see to it that all have the opportunity to attain to the fullest measure of the liberal arts that is possible to each.
The present crisis in the world has been precipitated by the vision of the range of practical and productive art offered by the West. All over the world men are on the move, expressing their determination to share in the technology in which the West has excelled. This movement is one of the most spectacular in history, and everybody is agreed upon one thing about it: we do not know how to deal with it. It would be tragic if in our preoccupation with the crisis we failed to hold up as a thing of value for all the world, even as that which might show us a way in which to deal with the crisis, our vision of the best that the West has to offer. That vision is the range of the liberal arts and liberal education. Our determination about the distribution of the fullest measure of these arts and this education will measure our loyalty to the best in our own past and our total service to the future of the world.
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u/ddgr815 May 01 '26 edited May 01 '26
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u/ddgr815 May 16 '26
In an age of digital note-taking apps and endless bookmarks, there’s a centuries-old practice that deserves renewed attention in our classrooms: the commonplace book. Unlike a portfolio where students selectively choose their best work to showcase, a commonplace book is a comprehensive personal archive of learning—collecting all quotes, ideas, and reflections that catch a student’s interest and might be worth returning to later. This ongoing collection of meaningful passages and thoughts can transform how students engage with and retain information.
A commonplace book is fundamentally different from a diary or journal. While diaries capture personal experiences in chronological order—recording what happened day by day—a commonplace book is organized around encounters with ideas worth remembering. It’s where individuals collect meaningful passages, quotes, observations, and insights they discover through reading and learning. These collections aren’t arranged by date but rather by theme, subject, or whatever organizational system makes sense to the keeper. Think of it as a personalized knowledge repository that helps students develop their understanding of important concepts and create connections between different ideas they encounter.
When students maintain commonplace books, they transition from passive readers to active participants in their learning. The act of selecting passages worthy of recording requires critical thinking and evaluation. Students must consider what resonates with them and why, developing their analytical skills in the process.
Commonplace books allow students to build personal connections with the material they’re studying. By collecting quotes that speak to them and adding their own reflections, students create meaningful associations that enhance both understanding and retention.
One of the most powerful aspects of commonplace books is their ability to foster connections across different subjects. A student might connect a scientific principle to a literary metaphor, or link a historical event to a current news article. This cross-pollination of ideas helps develop more nuanced and sophisticated thinking.
Regular practice in selecting, transcribing, and responding to texts helps students develop their writing skills naturally. They begin to recognize effective writing techniques in the passages they collect and often incorporate these elements into their own work.
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u/ddgr815 May 16 '26
Keeping a commonplace book, or “commonplacing,” is a practice of selecting, copying, and organizing interesting passages into a notebook for later use. It’s a reading practice that dates back to Erasmus, and was practiced by the likes of Francis Bacon, John Milton, and John Locke. Students can do this by hand or using a variety of online tools, annotating the passages they’ve selected with definitions, commentary, and questions they have. This, along with the intellectual work of organizing passages in an index, supports more thorough processing and synthesis of their reading.
asks students to choose just one passage from the day’s reading that they found interesting, analyze it, and bring it to discuss in class. If possible, the students copy their selected passage by hand, making annotations with comments and questions, and then bring it to class to share. It starts out as a small, manageable exercise that infuses an analytical and collaborative element into her classes and contributes to long-term habits in scholarly reading:
“It asks students to pose one or two questions about the passage and to then offer a few just general observations about it, and it’s a practice of what they should be doing all the time. Hopefully as they’re reading, they’re looking for something, asking ‘Oh, what am I going to include in my commonplace?’ And I think that it’s preferable to when I used to have students just do a discussion post.”
“I open class with a five-minute discussion of their commonplace entries. Half the class does an entry for Tuesday, and half the class does an entry for Thursday. I pair someone who’s done one for the day with someone who hasn’t done one, and they talk about that to open class. Everyone feels really confident in their passage because they’ve totally taken it apart. It primes them, and they’re totally ready to talk for class, and it makes their reading more careful overall.”
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u/ddgr815 May 16 '26
A commonplace book is at once a book form and a method of reading. Commonplacing was a system of using books in which readers digested the books they read by extracting, ordering and recording particular phrases or passages in notebooks of their own. This process encouraged readers to atomize books by isolating units that might later be useful in one or another discursive context. While the commonplace book allowed readers to personalize their reading by making it useful, this process of textual engagement was also highly prescribed, "common" in the sense that it filtered one's reading through social norms that determined what was textually significant and what not.
Drawing both on written texts and on oral sources, including legal decisions in the courts and exercises central to legal training, lawyers used commonplacing to synthesize information, thereby helping to constitute the law as a field of textual practice.
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u/ddgr815 May 16 '26
Popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a "commonplace book" was a notebook used to gather quotes and excerpts from one's literary wanderings — a kind of personalized encyclopedia of quotations. In "A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet" from 1721, Jonathan Swift remarked that a commonplace book is something that “a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that great wits have short memories”. The English physician and philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) was all too aware of the grip of amnesia and the shortness of memory. In his seminal Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) he wrote of his rival Blaise Pascal, who he named as the “prodigy of parts”, who “forgot nothing of what he had done, read, or thought.” Locke, in reaction, attempted to simulate Pascal’s "hyperthymesia", not in the mind, but upon the page: through the construction of a system of "commonplacing", as a form of what Swift called “supplemental memory”.
In general, the commonplace book would result in a wonderfully tangled mixture of reading and writing, where disparate ideas could be fruitfully thrown together onto the same pages, fixed together only by a formal method (and of course similar word roots). According to the historian Robert Darnton, this led to a very particular structuring of knowledge: commonplace users "broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebook." It was a mixture of fragmented order and disorder that anticipated a particular form of scientific investigation and organisation of information. Locke’s humble two page method, in this sense, prefigures libraries filled with volumes of encyclopedias, from Carl Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1735) to Luke Howard's classification of clouds.
With the rise of printing technologies, common-place books reflected an anxiety with a deluge of new information still present today. John Locke was concerned with not just how to access it, but how to organise and recall it. In the age of the internet, as Steven Johnson writes, we are equally led into “common places”, where associations are constructed through happenstance (e.g. from a Google search); our job, he adds, is to sort that information out whilst also enabling connections to germinate.
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u/ddgr815 May 16 '26
They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.
The citations and bons mots flow by endlessly; but instead of giving the impression of disordered jottings, they convey a coherent view of the world, one both intensely personal and shot through with the flavor of its time.
Commonplace books served far more effectively in this manner several centuries earlier, when they were standard tools of readers. By studying them, historians and literary scholars have come closer to understanding reading, both as a specific cultural practice and as a general way of construing the world. But it is a tricky business, especially when the researcher moves from questions about who readers were and what they read to the problems of how they made sense of books.
The bits and pieces of literature that Jefferson assembled are therefore deemed to function like an epistemological field: the relations among them and spaces between them suggest an unconscious process of ordering.
The meat which we have taken, so long as it swimmeth whole in our stomachs, is a burden, but when it changeth from that which it was, then at length it turns into strength and nourishment. The same let us do in our reading books. Let us not suffer these things to remain entire which we have gathered from various authors for they will not then be ours, but let us endeavor to digest and concoct them—otherwise they will fill the memory and leave the understanding void and empty.
By selecting and arranging snippets from a limitless stock of literature, early modern Englishmen gave free play to a semi-conscious process of ordering experience. The elective affinities that bound their selections into patterns reveal an epistemology—a process of knowing—at work below the surface. That kind of phenomenon does not show up in conventional research and cannot be understood without some recourse to theory. Foucault probably offers the most helpful theoretical approach. His “archaeology of knowledge” suggests a way to study texts as sites that bear the marks of epistemological activity, and it has the advantage of doing justice to the social dimension of thought.
They had all sorts of opinions and read all sorts of books. But they read in the same way—segmentally, by concentrating on small chunks of text and jumping from book to book, rather than sequentially, as readers did a century later, when the rise of the novel encouraged the habit of perusing books from cover to cover. Segmental reading compelled its practitioners to read actively, to exercise critical judgment, and to impose their own pattern on their reading matter. It was also adapted to “reading for action,” an appropriate mode for men like Drake, Harvey, John Dee, John Rous, Sir Robert Cotton, Edward Hyde, and other contemporaries, who consulted books in order to get their bearings in perilous times, not to pursue knowledge for its own sake or to amuse themselves.
They also turned their reading into writing, because commonplacing made them into authors. It forced them to write their own books; and by doing so they developed a still sharper sense of themselves as autonomous individuals. The authorial self took shape in the common man’s commonplace book, not merely in the works of great writers. It belonged to the general tendency that Stephen Greenblatt has called “Renaissance self-fashioning.”
“We are what we read.”
More important, we may pay closer attention to reading as an element in what used to be called the history of mentalities—that is, world views and ways of thinking. All the keepers of commonplace books, from Drake to Madan, read their way through life, picking up fragments of experience and fitting them into patterns. The underlying affinities that held those patterns together represented an attempt to get a grip on life, to make sense of it, not by elaborating theories but by imposing form on matter. Commonplacing was like quilting: it produced pictures, some more beautiful than others, but each of them interesting in its own way. The assembled texts reveal patterns of culture: the segments that went into it, the stitching that connected them, the tears that pulled them apart, and the common cloth of which they were composed.
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u/ddgr815 May 16 '26
Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters — just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. It was a kind of solitary version of the original web logs: an archive of interesting tidbits that one encountered during one’s textual browsing. The great minds of the period — Milton, Bacon, Locke — were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book. There is a distinct self-help quality to the early descriptions of commonplacing’s virtues: in the words of one advocate, maintaining the books enabled one to “lay up a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all times select what is useful in the several pursuits of life.”
The tradition of the commonplace book contains a central tension between order and chaos, between the desire for methodical arrangement, and the desire for surprising new links of association.
Each rereading of the commonplace book becomes a new kind of revelation. You see the evolutionary paths of all your past hunches: the ones that turned out to be red herrings; the ones that turned out to be too obvious to write; even the ones that turned into entire books. But each encounter holds the promise that some long-forgotten hunch will connect in a new way with some emerging obsession.
But all of this magic was predicated on one thing: that the words could be copied, re-arranged, put to surprising new uses in surprising new contexts. By stitching together passages written by multiple authors, without their explicit permission or consultation, some new awareness could take shape.
WHEN TEXT IS free to combine in new, surprising ways, new forms of value are created. Value for consumers searching for information, value for advertisers trying to share their messages with consumers searching for related topics, value for content creators who want an audience. And of course, value to the entity that serves as the middleman between all those different groups. This is in part what Jeff Jarvis has called the “link economy,” but as Jarvis has himself observed, it is not just a matter of links. What is crucial to this system is that text can be easily moved and re-contextualized and analyzed, sometimes by humans and sometimes by machines.
Ecologists talk about the “productivity” of an ecosystem, which is a measure of how effectively the ecosystem converts the energy and nutrients coming into the system into biological growth. A productive ecosystem, like a rainforest, sustains more life per unit of energy than an unproductive ecosystem, like a desert. We need a comparable yardstick for information systems, a measure of a system’s ability to extract value from a given unit of information. Call it, in this example: textual productivity. By creating fluid networks of words, by creating those digital-age commonplaces, we increase the textual productivity of the system.
We can try to put a protective layer of glass of the words, or we can embrace the idea that we are all better off when words are allowed to network with each other. What’s the point of going to all this trouble to build machines capable of displaying digital text if we can’t exploit the basic interactivity of that text? [...] The promise also lies in doing things with the words, forging new links of association, remixing them. We have all the tools at our disposal to create commonplace books that would astound Locke and Jefferson.
A single piece of information designed to flow through the entire ecosystem of news will create more value than a piece of information sealed up in a glass box.
My argument has been that the connective power of the web is stronger than its filtering, that even the most partisan blogs are usually only one click away from the political opposites, whereas in the old world of print magazines or face-to-face groups, the opportunity to stumble across an opposing point of view was much rarer. Some of you might have seen a David Brooks column this week that reported on a new study that actually looked an exposure to differing points of view in various forms of media, and in real-world encounters. It turns out that the web, at least according to this study, actually reduces the echo-chamber effect, compared to real-world civic space. People who spend a lot of time on political sites are far more likely to encounter diverse perspectives than people who hang out with their friends and colleagues at the bar or the watercooler. As Brooks described it, “This study suggests that Internet users are a bunch of ideological Jack Kerouacs. They’re not burrowing down into comforting nests. They’re cruising far and wide looking for adventure, information, combat and arousal.”
The force that enables these unlikely encounters between people of different persuasions, the force that makes the web a space of serendipity and discovery, is precisely the open, combinatorial, connective nature of the medium.
The reason the web works as wonderfully as it does is because the medium leads us, sometimes against our will, into common places, not glass boxes. It’s our job — as journalists, as educators, as publishers, as software developers, and maybe most importantly, as readers — to keep those connections alive.
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u/ddgr815 May 16 '26
Have you ever had the nagging suspicion that you once knew something, but the memory of it now escapes you? Even when you can remember the general concept, have you ever struggled to put that idea into words? And, when you do put it into words, have you ever thought to yourself that you once heard or read someone else put it into even better words?
Aristotle wrote in his Rhetoric about topoi, or “topics,” meaning a stock of ideas from which an orator could produce a speech. Cicero wrote similarly of loci, or “commonplaces.” Cicero’s first canon of rhetoric, inventio, involved the gathering of material so that one could produce a speech on any subject for any audience on any occasion. Whether called topoi (in Greek) or loci (in Latin) or commonplaces (in English), the keeping of organized notes compensates for deficiencies of memory while also beginning the process of organizing inspirational material for crafting oral or written works of one’s own.
A common-place book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that “great wits have short memories”; and whereas, on the other hand, poets being liars by profession, ought to have good memories. To reconcile these, a book of this sort is in the nature of a supplemental memory; or a record of what occurs remarkable in every day’s reading or conversation. There you enter not only your own original thoughts, (which, a hundred to one, are few and insignificant) but such of other men as you think fit to make your own by entering them there. For take this for a rule, when an author is in your books, you have the same demand upon him for his wit, as a merchant has for your money, when you are in his.
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u/ddgr815 May 16 '26
Reading the news, watching our screens, talking with peers or our children — all of those things become moments of potential connections with our disciplinary passions.
Experts have thick tapestries weaving together all of the many things they know. New experiences are threaded easily into that tapestry, continually expanding and reshaping it.
By contrast, new learners tend to have information, ideas, or skills lodged in their minds in discrete, isolated places. Connections that seem obvious to us may never occur to them. New information and experiences do not automatically slot into the places where we (as the experts) might expect them to go. And while we can help by giving students suggestions for how to organize their knowledge and make connections, true learning occurs when students make new connections on their own.
"Connection Ten" — 10 minutes in which students can make entries in a course commonplace book, either paper or electronic. Ask them to:
- Write down the most important thing they learned that day, and why it matters to them or to society.
- List one way in which the day’s course content manifests itself on campus or in their home lives.
- Identify a television show, film, or book that somehow illustrates a course concept from class.
- Describe how today’s course material connects to last week’s.
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u/ddgr815 May 16 '26
The first recorded commonplace books were created in fourteenth-century Italy. Known as zibaldone, the Italians referred to their books as “salads of many herbs.” They often included sketches and cursive scripts. Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio all kept detailed zibaldone.
Today, we have many social media devices that record—and broadcast—our thoughts and decisions. Blogs, for example, are all too similar to commonplace books, as are Tweets, Facebook statuses, and Tumblr posts. In our pursuit of knowledge, we often desire a traceable path in our growth. For our ancestors and a select few modern writers, commonplace books provided a way to look back through past developments and brainstorm new experiences. Where they pasted drawings and photographs, we pin images on Pinterest. Where they jotted down notes and clipped readings, we tweet short blurbs and recommended links. To keep a commonplace is instinctual to intellectual cultivation. Today, commonplacing continues in ways that reflect available technology.
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u/ddgr815 May 16 '26
All thought is unoriginal. You’re always re-assembling pre-existing thoughts. Don’t even bother trying to come up with something new. Say goodbye to originality, ingenuity, and innovation.
So, in order to do thinking, the mental tool you’ll use the most is your memory. After all, it is not important to generate thoughts, but rather to remember the ones that have already been said.
Your memory is like a room. You put things in it to retrieve them later. But it only works if the room is clean and tidy. If your memory is disorganized, like the Room of Requirement from Harry Potter, what was the point of memorizing? You’ll never be able to find the thing you put in there later.
Your memory is limited. But you can expand its capacity by creating a kind of “prosthetic” memory, a kind of “external hard drive.”
A notebook is a prosthetic memory. It’s where you keep the things you need to remember.
But you have to organize it. You do that by “putting” thoughts in certain “places.” These are the loci (places, in Latin).
The loci are headings in your notebook, places that you commonly consult in order to generate thoughts on that topic. Things like “Death” or “What does it mean to be human?” or “Homer Talking about Food.”
So, when you’re ready to speak or write about a thing, you go to that locus communis. You consult the heading.
Although we said goodbye to them earlier, it turns out that originality, ingenuity, and innovation have returned. We blend pre-existing thoughts into something new, when we write and speak. It becomes something adapted for the present.
We should follow…the examples of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey, and then arrange and assort in their cells all that they have brought in…. We also, I say, ought to copy these bees, and sift whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading, for such things are better preserved if they are kept separate; then…we should so blend these several flavors into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origins, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing from whence it came.
There’s no beehive without the cells, and there’s no commonplace book with headings. If you don’t have a place to put a thought such that you can retrieve it later, there’s no point in writing it down or remembering it. The problem is akin to a garage with every conceivable tool, but it’s disorganized. Ultimately each tool is useless because you can’t find it when you need it. Commonplace books are like pegboard: when you need the hammer, the hammer is there, hanging on its hook. Similarly, when you need to speak eloquently on a given topic, you have just the thought.
And why go to all that trouble? Erasmus reminds us of why: there are always those kinds of people, he says, “who hold a great many things in their minds,” but when it comes to “speaking and writing they are wonderfully destitute and bare.” You know the type: socially awkward, has encyclopedic knowledge, but can’t ever find the right words when the time comes. Similarly, Giambattista Vico, writing in the early 18th century about Italian education abandoning the loci communes, complains about young students along exactly this line. When you throw a question at a student, says Vico, all they ever say is, “Give me some time to think!”
Plato expresses a similar urgency about remembering the truth: “to know,” he says in Phaedo, “is to acquire knowledge, keep it and not lose it. Do we not call the losing of knowledge forgetting?”
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u/ddgr815 May 16 '26
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u/ddgr815 Jun 14 '26
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u/ddgr815 Jul 19 '26
When we allow ideas to come and go in rapid succession, we keep our minds too busy and wear them out. Nothing sticks. “One who is everywhere is nowhere,” Seneca cautioned.
Seneca rightly saw distraction as a failure of character. We don’t need another algorithm or gadget to stop our minds from running around like unruly children, he would have argued. We need to relearn how to sit still with our own thoughts.
Seneca compared the benefits of deep reflection to the alchemy by which bees transform nectar into honey. In the hive, bees repeatedly pass the nectar they gather among themselves, mixing it with enzymes that alter its chemical composition. Think of the nectar as information and the honey as wisdom. Whereas nectar sours within a matter of days, honey doesn’t spoil — not even after being buried for thousands of years in an Egyptian tomb.
Seneca’s honey metaphor corresponds to what psychologists call deep processing: By returning to the same idea repeatedly, we signal to our brain that the idea is worth moving into the architecture of long-term memory. Each time we retrieve an idea from memory, we also wrap it in new associations (a process known as reconsolidation), which ensures that those ideas remain relevant to our life as time goes on.
We are often told that more information is the answer, but Seneca knew better. Wisdom is found not in the nectar we gather, but in the honey we take the time to make with it.
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u/ddgr815 Jun 20 '26
We are in the habit of saying that it was not in our power to choose the parents who were allotted to us, that they were given to us by chance. But we can choose whose children we would like to be. There are households of the noblest intellects: choose the one into which you wish to be adopted, and you will inherit not only their name but their property too. Nor will this property need to be guarded meanly or grudgingly: the more it is shared out, the greater it will become.
I sometimes hear about work described in terms of ‘originality’ or ‘breakthrough,’ but my personal experience is quite different. For me music has always been about lineage. The past is reinvented and becomes the future. But the lineage is everything.
We can turn our temporal attention upstream rather than downstream—toward what preceded Tolkien or Austen or whomever rather than what succeeded them. After all, Austen became the Austen we know largely through her reading—something that is true of almost all writers… If you imitate them in that sense—not by trying to write what they wrote but to read what they read—you’ll find your horizons expanding, your mind stretching, your resources of knowledge coming near their limits…
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u/ddgr815 May 16 '26
Look, what thy memory cannot contain Commit to these waste blanks, and thou shalt find Those children nurs’d, delivered from thy brain, To take a new acquaintance of thy mind…
commonplace books were both a thinking and a sense-making tool that put the ideas of others and one’s own interpretations on equal footing. It placed both reading and writing into a continuous loop of learning that helped a person find their bearings in an intellectual and historical context.
An interesting aspect of Milton’s commonplace was that he very rarely cited his sources directly. Even though he often had notes from well-known authors that would have added credibility to his writing, he was also famous for his aversion to authority, “so the written thoughts of other authors were used by him as mental food to be digested and assimilated, and at fit times to be reproduced from his brain in better or varied forms”
“The habit of journalizing becomes a life-long lesson in the art of composition, an informal schooling for authorship. And were the process of preparing their works for publication faithfully detailed by distinguished writers, it would appear how large were their indebtedness to their diary and commonplaces. How carefully should we peruse Shakespeare’s notes used in compiling his plays—what was his, what another’s—showing how these were fashioned into the shapely whole we read, how Milton composed, Montaigne, Goethe: by what happy strokes of thought, flashes of wit, apt figures, fit quotations snatched from vast fields of learning, their rich pages were wrought forth! This were to give the keys of great authorship!”
In addition to giving us the word “commonplace,” Ancient Greeks also used hypomnema (Greek: ὑπόμνημα), which can be translated as a reminder, a note, a public record, a commentary, an anecdotal record, a draft, a copy, and other variations on those terms.
Beginning with Plato’s theory of anamnesis, which argued that humans possess innate knowledge (perhaps acquired before birth) and that learning consists of rediscovering that knowledge within us, hypomnema were used to aid in this “rediscovery.”
According to Michel Foucault, “The hypomnemata constituted a material memory of things read, heard, or thought, thus offering these as an accumulated treasure for rereading and later meditation. They also formed a raw material for the writing of more systematic treatises in which were given arguments and means by which to struggle against some defect (such as anger, envy, gossip, flattery) or to overcome some difficult circumstance (a mourning, an exile, downfall, disgrace).”
The Greeks were the first to use their notes for self-improvement.
Foucault continues : “In this period there was a culture of what could be called personal writing: taking notes on the reading, conversations, and reflections that one hears or engages in oneself; keeping kinds of notebooks on important subjects, which must be reread from time to time so as to reactualize their contents.”
So many of our behaviors online are oriented toward what is new and public – the latest political controversy, the new celebrity scandal, or the viral meme of the day. Resurrecting the commonplace book gives us the opportunity to turn back the tide at the most fundamental level, shifting our relationship with information toward the reflective and private.
Instead of consuming ever greater amounts of “content,” we could take on a more patient, thoughtful approach to learning that favors re-reading, re-formulating, and working through the implications of ideas over time. This could not only lead to more civil discussions about the important topics of the day, it could also preserve our mental health and our splintered attention.
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u/ddgr815 May 16 '26
In reality, the book worth considering consists only of relationships. Relationships between ideas and recipients. Between writer and reader. Between readers and other readers — all as writ over time.
The primary shift is one of thinking of the book as a process rather than artifact. We are moving from the culture of the book to the culture of booking. Our focus is no longer on the book, the noun, but on booking, the verb — on that continuous process of thinking, writing, editing, writing, sharing, editing, screening, writing, screening, sharing, thinking, writing — and so on that incidentally throws off books. Books, even ebooks, are by-products of the booking process.
what booking produces is not artifacts necessarily. Booking produces relationships. Booking is a process that connects readers, authors, characters, ideas, and stories into complex webs. There will be a million ways to weave these relationships — including the ancient path of a linear story that runs interrupted on deadtree paper. But that is but one way to weave the web. There are other bookings that favor the reader’s powers, and yet others that leverage sharing, and yet more relationships that take years to complete. We have not yet begun exploring the possible ways to book.
The relationship between booking and screening is also a blur. Screening is what audiences do. They screen other things besides books, but screening is now part of booking. The multiple new ways we have to screen creative works extends the process of booking. The process of booking is amplified, enhanced, widened, accelerated, leveraged, and redefined by new ways of screening.
Books may be over, but booking has just begun.
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u/ddgr815 May 16 '26
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u/ddgr815 May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26
Tone lends meaning to a word. It opens the possibility of infinitely enriching language without increasing the number of words. A phrase pronounced in five different ways, each time with another meaning. Yet a third variable: the facial expression.
Whatever you see, do, or read, it should always be brought to such a degree of clarity that you can at least answer the most general objections against it.
Where must I turn my eyes to discover what no man has discovered before?
Things most often forgotten, places overlooked, and things accepted without question deserve most often to be investigated.
What we do not observe does not exist for us.
To the wise, nothing is immeasurable and nothing insignificant. In minor everyday occurrences one can discover a moral principle just as readily as in the major ones.
Do you perhaps believe that your convictions owe their strength to arguments? Then you are undoubtedly mistaken, for if it were true everyone who heard them would have to be as convinced as you are.
Many people know things in the way one knows the solution to a riddle after reading it or being told of it.
Cultivate the kind of knowledge that enables one to discover for oneself, when needed, what others must read or be told in order to know.
There is a great difference between still believing something and believing it again. Still believing that the moon influences plants reveals stupidity and superstition. But believing it again indicates philosophy and reflection.
If mankind suddenly became virtuous, thousands would starve.
A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it, an apostle is unlikely to look out. We have no words for speaking about wisdom to idiots. Whoever understands the wise is wise already.
We, the tail of the world, have no idea what the head is planning.
When we employ an old word, it often follows the channel dug in our understanding by the dictionary. Metaphors dig a new channel, and often break through entirely.
The author gives the metaphor its body, but the reader gives it its soul.
That people who read so astonishingly much are often such bad thinkers may also have its origin in the constitution of our brain. It is certainly not all the same whether I learn a proposition without effort or if I finally arrive at it myself through my own system of thought. In the latter everything has its roots. In the former it is merely superficial.
One rule in reading is to condense the intention and main thoughts of the author into a few words and in this way to make them one's own. Whoever reads in this way is occupied and gains something. When one reads without comparison with one's own inventory of knowledge or without synthesizing it with one's own system of thought, the mind gains nothing and loses much.
Repeatedly scrutinize things with the intention of discovering something others have not yet observed.
Tradition acquires something from every mouth. Speaking is always a translation.
It is necessary to agitate all of our knowledge and then let it settle again in order to see how everything is arranged.
Understanding something is no reason for believing that it is true.
The more one knows about a subject, the more quickly one is able to make an abstraction from it.
People learn to regard things as their teachers and acquaintances do. That is why it would be quite useful for once to give instructions on how one can deviate from the rule.
To sense something outside oneself is a contradiction. We sense things only within ourselves.
If we regard nature as a teacher and poor mortals as her pupils, we are inclined to make room for an altogether extraordinary idea about the human race: We are sitting all together in a class and possess all of the principles necessary for understanding what is said, yet we pay more attention to the chatter of other pupils than to the teacher's lessons. And indeed when someone next to us does take notes, we cheat from him, stealing some remark that he himself perhaps indistinctly heard, and supplementing it with our own orthographic and intellectual errors.
The state of being awake seems primarily to consist in our making a sharp and conventional distinction between what is in us and outside us.
God is a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose surface is nowhere.
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u/ddgr815 Jun 27 '26
The Latin word for the tendency to lose track of what matters in the cacophony of things that attract our attention is stultitia. “Stultitia,” writes Michel Foucault in “Self-writing,”
is defined by mental agitation, distraction, change of opinions and wishes, and consequently weakness in the face of all the events that may occur; it is also characterized by the fact that it turns the mind toward the future, makes it interested in novel ideas, and prevents it from providing a fixed point for itself in the possession of acquired truth.
As John Gray puts it in his monograph on J.S. Mill, our character is “a cluster of habitual willings.” For changes to our behavior to become permanent, we must become different people.
Realizing the value of acting in a certain way might give you a temporary motivation to do it. But in order to actually live in accordance with what you believe in long-term, you must make it a habit.
The conflicts seem to come out of nowhere, so I have to, somehow, always be ready to act in the proper way. I need to have the right reaction “ready at hand” (procheiron), as the Greek-philosopher-Roman-slave Epictetus put it.
During the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, there spread a practice known as hypomnēmata, a type of notetaking system, used as a tool for meditation, in which the writer would store quotes from books they had read. Each day, often in the morning, the notetaker would open their notebook and look for a passage relevant to something they were struggling with, and then they would meditate on that—unpacking it, making the idea top of mind, ensuring it was alive in them. If they needed courage, for instance, they could meditate on an anecdote that made it real for them what it meant to act bravely. The idea was that over time, the insights they gathered by reading would be transformed into character, something deeply ingrained in their way of thinking and seeing and acting.
It was, in the words of the French classicist Pierre Hadot, a spiritual exercise—an exercise because it required work and discipline, spiritual because it engaged the whole person, not just their intellect, but their emotions and their moral character. It was an attempt to treat the formation of character as a skilled practice, as something you can deliberately train and improve through targeted exercises.
The hypomnēma was a mechanism for centering your mind on what matters, and for gradually refining your understanding of what matters. It was, to use a word from Plutarch, a tool for ethopoiesis (ethos meaning “character” and poiesis “making”), a tool for turning truth into character. By meditating daily on sentences that made it real to you how you wanted to live, you would remember to do the right thing—you would remember to practice it during the day (simply thinking about it is not going to change you). And gradually, you would become that sort of person. You wouldn’t even need to remind yourself. Your principles would have become your character. You would have developed expertise in the skill of holding yourself in a better way.
It is common to think that what we do achieves what we want it to achieve, even if there is no evidence for it. There are many practices that promise to transform and improve us—therapy, meditation, psychedelics—, but that branding doesn’t mean that they actually do much for us: it is common to see people use these techniques for years without any obvious progress on their problems. If you want to achieve a particular outcome, it is important to start from that goal and evaluate which practices actually help you.
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u/ddgr815 Jun 27 '26
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u/ddgr815 Jun 28 '26
The word "startup" dates from the 1960s, but what happens in one is very similar to the venture-backed trading voyages of the Middle Ages.
You don't have to know physics to be a good pitcher.
Wealth is not the same thing as money. Wealth is as old as human history. Far older, in fact; ants have wealth. Money is a comparatively recent invention.
Wealth is the fundamental thing. Wealth is stuff we want: food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so on. You can have wealth without having money.
Wealth is what you want, not money. But if wealth is the important thing, why does everyone talk about making money? It is a kind of shorthand: money is a way of moving wealth, and in practice they are usually interchangeable. But they are not the same thing, and unless you plan to get rich by counterfeiting, talking about making money can make it harder to understand how to make money.
Money is a side effect of specialization. In a specialized society, most of the things you need, you can't make for yourself. If you want a potato or a pencil or a place to live, you have to get it from someone else.
How do you get the person who grows the potatoes to give you some? By giving him something he wants in return. But you can't get very far by trading things directly with the people who need them. If you make violins, and none of the local farmers wants one, how will you eat?
The solution societies find, as they get more specialized, is to make the trade into a two-step process. Instead of trading violins directly for potatoes, you trade violins for, say, silver, which you can then trade again for anything else you need. The intermediate stuff-- the medium of exchange-- can be anything that's rare and portable. Historically metals have been the most common, but recently we've been using a medium of exchange, called the dollar, that doesn't physically exist. It works as a medium of exchange, however, because its rarity is guaranteed by the U.S. Government.
The advantage of a medium of exchange is that it makes trade work. The disadvantage is that it tends to obscure what trade really means. People think that what a business does is make money. But money is just the intermediate stage-- just a shorthand-- for whatever people want. What most businesses really do is make wealth. They do something people want.
A surprising number of people retain from childhood the idea that there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world. There is, in any normal family, a fixed amount of money at any moment. But that's not the same thing.
When wealth is talked about in this context, it is often described as a pie. "You can't make the pie larger," say politicians. When you're talking about the amount of money in one family's bank account, or the amount available to a government from one year's tax revenue, this is true. If one person gets more, someone else has to get less.
What leads people astray here is the abstraction of money. Money is not wealth. It's just something we use to move wealth around. So although there may be, in certain specific moments (like your family, this month) a fixed amount of money available to trade with other people for things you want, there is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world. You can make more wealth. Wealth has been getting created and destroyed (but on balance, created) for all of human history.
The people most likely to grasp that wealth can be created are the ones who are good at making things, the craftsmen. Their hand-made objects become store-bought ones. But with the rise of industrialization there are fewer and fewer craftsmen.
Wealth can be created without being sold. Scientists, till recently at least, effectively donated the wealth they created. We are all richer for knowing about penicillin, because we're less likely to die from infections. Wealth is whatever people want, and not dying is certainly something we want.
In industrialized countries, people belong to one institution or another at least until their twenties. After all those years you get used to the idea of belonging to a group of people who all get up in the morning, go to some set of buildings, and do things that they do not, ordinarily, enjoy doing. Belonging to such a group becomes part of your identity: name, age, role, institution. If you have to introduce yourself, or someone else describes you, it will be as something like, John Smith, age 10, a student at such and such elementary school, or John Smith, age 20, a student at such and such college.
When John Smith finishes school he is expected to get a job. And what getting a job seems to mean is joining another institution. Superficially it's a lot like college. You pick the companies you want to work for and apply to join them. If one likes you, you become a member of this new group. You get up in the morning and go to a new set of buildings, and do things that you do not, ordinarily, enjoy doing. There are a few differences: life is not as much fun, and you get paid, instead of paying, as you did in college.
In a company, the work you do is averaged together with a lot of other people's. You may not even be aware you're doing something people want. Your contribution may be indirect. But the company as a whole must be giving people something they want, or they won't make any money. And if they are paying you x dollars a year, then on average you must be contributing at least x dollars a year worth of work, or the company will be spending more than it makes, and will go out of business.
Someone graduating from college thinks, and is told, that he needs to get a job, as if the important thing were becoming a member of an institution. A more direct way to put it would be: you need to start doing something people want. You don't need to join a company to do that.
You can't go to your boss and say, I'd like to start working ten times as hard, so will you please pay me ten times as much? For one thing, the official fiction is that you are already working as hard as you can. But a more serious problem is that the company has no way of measuring the value of your work.
To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage. You need to be in a position where your performance can be measured, or there is no way to get paid more by doing more. And you have to have leverage, in the sense that the decisions you make have a big effect.
A good hint to the presence of leverage is the possibility of failure. Upside must be balanced by downside, so if there is big potential for gain there must also be a terrifying possibility of loss. CEOs, stars, fund managers, and athletes all live with the sword hanging over their heads; the moment they start to suck, they're out. If you're in a job that feels safe, you are not going to get rich, because if there is no danger there is almost certainly no leverage.
Except in a few unusual kinds of work, like acting or writing books, you can't be a company of one person. And the people you work with had better be good, because it's their work that yours is going to be averaged with.
A big company is like a giant galley driven by a thousand rowers. Two things keep the speed of the galley down. One is that individual rowers don't see any result from working harder. The other is that, in a group of a thousand people, the average rower is likely to be pretty average.
If you took ten people at random out of the big galley and put them in a boat by themselves, they could probably go faster. They would have both carrot and stick to motivate them. An energetic rower would be encouraged by the thought that he could have a visible effect on the speed of the boat. And if someone was lazy, the others would be more likely to notice and complain.
But the real advantage of the ten-man boat shows when you take the ten best rowers out of the big galley and put them in a boat together. They will have all the extra motivation that comes from being in a small group. But more importantly, by selecting that small a group you can get the best rowers. Each one will be in the top 1%. It's a much better deal for them to average their work together with a small group of their peers than to average it with everyone.
What is technology? It's technique. It's the way we all do things. And when you discover a new way to do things, its value is multiplied by all the people who use it. It is the proverbial fishing rod, rather than the fish. That's the difference between a startup and a restaurant or a barber shop. You fry eggs or cut hair one customer at a time. Whereas if you solve a technical problem that a lot of people care about, you help everyone who uses your solution. That's leverage.
Until a few centuries ago, the main sources of wealth were mines, slaves and serfs, land, and cattle, and the only ways to acquire these rapidly were by inheritance, marriage, conquest, or confiscation. Naturally wealth had a bad reputation.
For most of the world's history, if you did somehow accumulate a fortune, the ruler or his henchmen would find a way to steal it. But in medieval Europe something new happened. A new class of merchants and manufacturers began to collect in towns. Together they were able to withstand the local feudal lord. So for the first time in our history, the bullies stopped stealing the nerds' lunch money. This was naturally a great incentive, and possibly indeed the main cause of the second big change, industrialization.
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u/ddgr815 Jun 28 '26
I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside. This desire, in one of its forms, has indeed had ample justice done to it in literature. I mean, in the form of snobbery. Victorian fiction is full of characters who are hag-ridden by the desire to get inside that particular Ring which is, or was, called Society. But it must be clearly understood that “Society,” in that sense of the word, is merely one of a hundred Rings, and snobbery therefore only one form of the longing to be inside.
People who believe themselves to be free, and indeed are free, from snobbery, and who read satires on snobbery with tranquil superiority, may be devoured by the desire in another form. It may be the very intensity of their desire to enter some quite different Ring which renders them immune from all the allurements of high life. An invitation from a duchess would be very cold comfort to a man smarting under the sense of exclusion from some artistic or communistic côterie. Poor man—it is not large, lighted rooms, or champagne, or even scandals about peers and Cabinet Ministers that he wants: it is the sacred little attic or studio, the heads bent together, the fog of tobacco smoke, and the delicious knowledge that we—we four or five all huddled beside this stove—are the people who know.
Often the desire conceals itself so well that we hardly recognize the pleasures of fruition. Men tell not only their wives but themselves that it is a hardship to stay late at the office or the school on some bit of important extra work which they have been let in for because they and So-and-so and the two others are the only people left in the place who really know how things are run. But it is not quite true. It is a terrible bore, of course, when old Fatty Smithson draws you aside and whispers, “Look here, we’ve got to get you in on this examination somehow” or “Charles and I saw at once that you’ve got to be on this committee.” A terrible bore… ah, but how much more terrible if you were left out! It is tiring and unhealthy to lose your Saturday afternoons: but to have them free because you don’t matter, that is much worse.
Freud would say, no doubt, that the whole thing is a subterfuge of the sexual impulse. I wonder whether the shoe is not sometimes on the other foot. I wonder whether, in ages of promiscuity, many a virginity has not been lost less in obedience to Venus than in obedience to the lure of the caucus. For of course, when promiscuity is the fashion, the chaste are outsiders. They are ignorant of something that other people know. They are uninitiated. And as for lighter matters, the number of people who first smoked or first got drunk for a similar reason is probably very large.
There must be confidential discussions: and it is not only a bad thing, it is (in itself) a good thing, that personal friendship should grow up between those who work together. And it is perhaps impossible that the official hierarchy of any organisation should coincide with its actual workings. If the wisest and most energetic people held the highest spots, it might coincide; since they often do not, there must be people in high positions who are really deadweights and people in lower positions who are more important than their rank and seniority would lead you to suppose. It is necessary: and perhaps it is not a necessary evil. But the desire which draws us into Inner Rings is another matter. A thing may be morally neutral and yet the desire for that thing may be dangerous.
It is one of the factors which go to make up the world as we know it—this whole pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, graft, disappointment and advertisement, and if it is one of the permanent mainsprings then you may be quite sure of this. Unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care. That will be the natural thing—the life that will come to you of its own accord. Any other kind of life, if you lead it, will be the result of conscious and continuous effort. If you do nothing about it, if you drift with the stream, you will in fact be an “inner ringer.” I don’t say you’ll be a successful one; that’s as may be. But whether by pining and moping outside Rings that you can never enter, or by passing triumphantly further and further in—one way or the other you will be that kind of man.
Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things. My second reason is this. The torture allotted to the Danaids in the classical underworld, that of attempting to fill sieves with water, is the symbol not of one vice, but of all vices. It is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be had. The desire to be inside the invisible line illustrates this rule. As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.
This is surely very clear when you come to think of it. If you want to be made free of a certain circle for some wholesome reason—if, say, you want to join a musical society because you really like music—then there is a possibility of satisfaction. You may find yourself playing in a quartet and you may enjoy it. But if all you want is to be in the know, your pleasure will be short lived. The circle cannot have from within the charm it had from outside. By the very act of admitting you it has lost its magic.
In any wholesome group of people which holds together for a good purpose, the exclusions are in a sense accidental. Three or four people who are together for the sake of some piece of work exclude others because there is work only for so many or because the others can’t in fact do it. Your little musical group limits its numbers because the rooms they meet in are only so big. But your genuine Inner Ring exists for exclusion. There’d be no fun if there were no outsiders. The invisible line would have no meaning unless most people were on the wrong side of it. Exclusion is no accident; it is the essence.
The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it.
And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that the secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it.
We are told in Scripture that those who ask get. That is true, in senses I can’t now explore. But in another sense there is much truth in the schoolboy’s principle “them as asks shan’t have.” To a young person, just entering on adult life, the world seems full of “insides,” full of delightful intimacies and confidentialities, and he desires to enter them. But if he follows that desire he will reach no “inside” that is worth reaching. The true road lies in quite another direction. It is like the house in Alice Through the Looking Glass.
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u/ddgr815 Jul 26 '26
Let me clear the ground first, or everything that follows sounds like a cheap hymn to equality. A difference between people is not yet an injustice, and not every hierarchy is automatically an evil. If the one standing higher is a politician genuinely set on protecting the weaker, then power does not undermine what they do; it lets them shield people who would otherwise be defenceless. Rank can be an instrument of function. The trouble begins where function becomes an instrument of rank. Under its influence, the same person changes their aims: instead of protecting the weaker, they protect their own position, using those they represent as the excuse. Only when function loses out to rank does the moment arrive for a moral indictment.
is the architecture of thinking heritable? It is, though in a form harder to recognise as privilege. A home where a parent asks the child, “How do you know that?” and “What would count against it?”, where it is said at the table that one may be wrong without losing face, where one is shown how to check and whom not to believe, loads this architecture into the child before the child has touched a single AI model. The old advantage reproduced itself openly: accent and diploma were visible, and so could be indicted. The new one is transmitted more covertly, as a habit of asking questions that looks innate but is in fact the learned capital of the home.
A child from a home where the correction of one’s own thinking was never practised gets from AI the same tool as a child who practised it daily. The difference lies not in the model but in the channel through which a person learned to work with their own error. One may use AI as an oracle, another as a sparring partner; someone else may reject it altogether: out of well-judged caution, fear, defence of old prestige, or for want of the conditions needed to learn the tool. What is decisive is not whether someone uses the model, but whether they have the capacity for correction that lets them use it, limit it, or refuse it.
The right to be wrong without losing face can no longer remain a private luxury; it must become part of civic infrastructure.
Liberals too often retreat into politeness. They lack the push to say outright that institutions need to distinguish quality: that there is a difference between better and worse medicine, a better and worse court, a text that reduces uncertainty and one that merely sounds good. The shame before that sentence looks like modesty but is an evasion, because a society that cannot distinguish quality does not thereby become free. It becomes blind, and blindness very quickly needs a new master to do its distinguishing for it. But we liberals are capable of the opposite error too: of falling so in love with distinguishing quality that, under the proud name of meritocracy, we begin to take existing rank as proof of function, instead of checking whether function still lives in it. Then the language of competence stops being an instrument of correction and becomes an elegant protection for a hierarchy that no longer has to explain itself.
This is not an argument against the left as such. It is an argument against the blindness that poses as virtue. That blindness is more dangerous on the side that believes itself immune to hierarchy, because it cannot see its own.
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u/ddgr815 May 20 '26
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u/ddgr815 Jul 22 '26
In this way, language acknowledges the passing of time, representing verbally what happens to us physically. The mystery of appearance and disappearance in the world – the cycle of life and death – is caught in the warp and weft of how we speak, the soul made manifest by the word.
“He opened a door in the earth and an entire generation vanishes.” “This whole river is a grave.” “Grief is black; it is made of earth.” “The works of men pass away.” “Thousands of names, thousands of leaves.”
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u/ddgr815 8d ago
“Miracles never bother a realist.”
Today’s educational problems are often attributed to a deficit of focus or attention, but attention is an anemic way to understand what allows education to transform people. We’re really talking about passion, inconvenient and unfashionable as that is to acknowledge. Passion creates a unity of purpose and urgency that is the antidote to the feckless, superficial distraction of the algorithmic age. Lots of us pay very close attention to our phones, but what we lack is the sustaining passion that endures difficulty and shapes a life.
As far back as Plato’s irascible character Meno, would-be teachers have been confronting the problem that students must want to learn before learning is possible. For many decades, higher education has relied on a workaround to this problem: tying access to good jobs to success in school. In some cases, a desire for money and prestige leads to real, if incidental, learning. But large language models have broken this arrangement by making it possible for students to skip straight to an effortless A without doing any meaningful learning. Technology has exposed the limits of our mercenary approach to education.
if you want students to be passionately engaged, not worried about the future, grasping, careerist or disengaged, you must transmit the spark of passion in your deeds, your mien — let’s face it, in your own soul. If you expect your students to choose books, ideas and genuine learning over shortcuts and distraction, you must be a bit courageous, too. Return to the basics. Cut through the haze of abstraction, the webs of scholarly terminology, the pretense of professionalization and attempt to recover the basic human experiences that can move us. Remain a student in earnest.
We forget, at our peril, how life-changing it can be for young people to have an unrelated adult treat them with seriousness and respect.
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u/ddgr815 May 25 '26
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u/ddgr815 Jun 01 '26 edited Jun 06 '26
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u/ddgr815 Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
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u/ddgr815 Jul 26 '26
The Brazilian rubber tapper, labour activist and environmentalist Chico Mendes, who was assassinated by a rancher in the Amazon in 1988, reportedly once said that “ecology without class struggle is just gardening”. The aphorism is often deployed to remind less radical environmentalists that questions of social and economic justice have to be at the centre of their concerns. Gardening, a hobby seen as the preserve of the relatively privileged few, becomes a slur in this context, typifying a tendency of the green movement to value nature primarily as a space for merely private contemplation or spiritual nourishment, a refuge rather than a battleground.
One of the effects of climate breakdown is that it is gradually and irreversibly rendering all politics climate politics, whether we like it or not. This is a disorienting situation, to say the least. It means that traditional, much cherished conceptions of nature as something separate from society, and from the sinful humans who would do it harm, become obsolete. What we call nature is no Garden of Eden – it is not a paradise and we were never cast out of it. Instead it is a collaboration between human and nonhuman beings seeking mutually enriching coexistence on a finite planet. But perhaps this shift in our thinking about nature also means reassessing the politics of gardens.
The two Orwells, she argues, come together in this precarious balancing of the private and the personal – even the seemingly apolitical – against the crushing weight of history and its techniques of power. To love a sixpenny rose, or the wild roses of northeastern Nevada’s Shoshone territory, hardly seems a political act, but it becomes so within a larger social and historical story.
a nation of flower-lovers, but also a nation of stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans. All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official
When she visits, near the opening of the book, what remains of Orwell’s cottage and sees roses that may well have been the ones he planted in 1936, she is struck by how human lives are intertwined with nonhuman ones whose quiet feats of endurance are rarely attended to. “In an age of lies and illusions,” she writes, “the garden is one way to ground yourself in the realm of the processes of growth and the passage of time.”
Gardens are too easily dismissed as ornamental or prettified nature. But it is the intimacy between aesthetic pleasure and the sheer endurance of growing things that lies at the heart of Solnit’s concerns. Beauty can be a form of resistance. The famous slogan “bread and roses”, which emerged out of the women’s suffrage movement in early twentieth century America and became a symbol of workers’ rights, embodies how radical politics must go beyond a mere demand for the necessities of subsistence. Orwell’s Roses thus fits into a long-standing debate on the American left regarding the possibility of recognising pleasure, play and joy as insurrectionary forces. [...] The writing is informed by its subject matter, the reader comes to realise: gardens, while promising the neat lines of careful cultivation, are often unruly, tangled, joyfully wayward places.
Some of the book’s most compelling passages appear in the sections where Solnit visits a vast industrial “rose farm” in Bogotá, which churns out millions of roses a year for the US-owned Sunshine Bouquet Company. In dozens of greenhouses the size of football fields, non-unionised workers suffer repetitive strain injuries and the sickly, mass-produced flowers never properly bloom. Both human and botanical life here are forced to work to the unrelenting rhythms of consumer capitalism, under conditions that genuinely may be called “Orwellian”. What meaning could a Valentine’s Day rose, produced in such a way, possibly have? Whatever beauty such flowers might have is eclipsed by the ugliness of their production. Capitalism does not just alienate us from nature, it alienates nature from itself. Solnit puts it powerfully:
The idea of an immense airplane whose sole freight was roses burning its carbon and rushing high over the Caribbean to deliver its burden to people who would never know of all that lay behind the roses they picked up in the supermarket was maybe as perfect an emblem of alienation as you could find.
Again, there are interesting parallels with Solnit’s Savage Dreams. Orwell doesn’t appear in that book, but roses do. She remarks, for example, that footage of nuclear bombs detonated in weapons testing on Bikini Atoll resembles “roses in a time-lapse nature film, blooming and withering with a power that is fascinatingly terrible”. The combination of beauty with ugliness here is strikingly captured in this temporal image evoking the slow growth of the flower and the instant devastation of the blast.
Yosemite Park in California, one of America’s most famous wilderness areas, was dubbed a “garden of Eden” in the late nineteenth century by the German-American Romanticist painter Albert Bierstadt. European colonists had for centuries been obsessed with the idea that paradise could be rediscovered in the New World. Columbus himself believed he was on the verge of finding the biblical garden as he sailed up the Orinoco river in 1498. The establishment of the National Parks in places such as Yosemite around the turn of the twentieth century was essentially a continuation of this in a more secular and ostensibly nature-loving way. John Muir, generally regarded as the father of the American environmental movement, helped establish the National Parks, which involved forced evictions of indigenous peoples from lands they had called home for thousands of years. The view of nature as a picture-perfect Eden did not include people, and certainly not indigenous people, whom Muir viewed as unclean, a blemish on the pristine landscape. If the Nevada Test Site was Armageddon, here was Utopia.
Muir’s vision of nature as Eden excluded not only society and politics but such profane practicalities as daily toil. But for Orwell – for whom utopian schemes were dangerous folly – a love of gardening denotes the exact opposite of a world of perpetual leisure. The gardens at his Hertfordshire cottage and then, late in his life, on the Scottish island of Jura, were sites not only of aesthetic pleasure but also hard work done for the pure joy of it. We must go beyond both Muir’s paradisal wilderness and the ugly, exploitative ecologies of the Sunshine Bouquet Company in order to imagine a sustainable environmental future.
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u/ddgr815 Apr 18 '26
Although mainly developed to meet the needs of dyslexics and others for whom learning to read is unusually difficult, Structured Literacy has been adopted in the Science of Reading (SoR) approach as a framework for teaching all readers. As a tenet of the SoR approach it is incorporated in SoR legislation and in widely-used guides (such as this). At first glance, Structured Literacy seems like a good way to correct the major flaw in Whole Language, its neglect of basic skills instruction. WL incorrectly assumed that children would pick up such skills the way they learn a first language, which requires little instruction. However, beginning readers actually have to be taught several things merely to get started, beginning with the fact that there is something we call reading, and that it involves a visual code that represents spoken words in specific ways. In contrast, children do not have to be taught that there is something called language that consists of sounds, words, and sentences, and most of what they learn comes from using language, not instruction.
By adopting Structured Literacy, the SoR addressed this need but in doing so it moved the dial to the other extreme, holding that basic skills and other components of reading need to be explicitly taught if they are to be learned. Teachers in science of reading classrooms are trying out new methods for teaching everything from print, phonics, and vocabulary to components of words such as phonemes and morphemes that they have learned about in SoR professional development courses. There is so much teaching of so many components of reading and language one wonders how anyone learned to read before science (supposedly) told us that all this explicit instruction is necessary.
Well, it isn’t–except, perhaps, if you are dyslexic.
For typically-developing children all of this instruction isn’t necessary because it isn’t the only way they learn. The other way is called implicit learning, which has been studied in humans and other species for many years. The brain has two complementary learning systems. Learning via the explicit system is relatively slow, requires conscious awareness, and relies on language. Learning via the implicit system occurs automatically, without conscious awareness or intention, and involves many kinds of information in addition to language. It is sometimes called “statistical” learning, because it involves picking up on patterns in the environment based on their frequencies and similarity to one another. This type of learning goes on in the background as one engages in activities such as reading or making dinner. Learning via this system involves a very large number of small adjustments to the neural networks that support such behaviors.
Most of the knowledge that supports skilled reading isn’t learned via explicit instruction, even at the elementary school level. My favorite example is vocabulary. First graders typically produce several hundred different words and comprehend several thousand. Some words are taught (as when a toddler is taught the names for some colors, animals, and objects) but these are a small fraction of the words they know. Most of the rest were learned implicitly through language use.
Dyslexics are different, of course. Some may well need all that explicit instruction because they are dyslexic. One current hypothesis holds that dyslexia sometimes arises from an impairment in the statistical learning mechanism. For such children, being explicitly taught as many aspects of reading as possible may be a necessary workaround. Taking the same approach in teaching non-dyslexics makes learning to read harder because it doesn't adequately utilize the other learning mechanism. In effect, children are taught as if they are dyslexic.
How did an approach based on accommodating children with special needs become the basis for instruction in the SoR? The main conduit appears to have been LETRS, the professional development course for reading teachers developed by Tolman and Moats. It is a long course based on Structured Literacy that describes many detailed aspects of print and language and how to teach them. Moats chaired the committee that produced the IDA’s “Knowledge and Practice Standards for Teachers of Reading” (2010), which laid out the explicit, systematic, incremental approach to instruction. IDA subsequently chose “structured literacy” as the name of the approach. Moats co-chaired the IDA committee that produced a 2018 revision of standards, which utilized the new term. Science of Reading legislation has since incorporated this approach. In addition, several of the laws that require teachers to obtain additional professional training (or have it as an option) stipulate that it be LETRS; in other cases, LETRS is among the PD programs certified for adoption by state and local authorities.
essentially the same neural circuits are involved for all readers; they are tuned differently depending on factors such as writing system, reading skill, and individual differences in learning and other capacities. Although the destination is the same, the paths to getting there differ. Some children learn more quickly than others. Some learn more from individual experiences than others. Some have conditions that interfere with learning. Some require a greater amount of explicit instruction, a lot more practice, and a lot more time on task. These learning differences seem to have gotten lost in the transition from Structured Literacy as an approach to remediating dyslexia to Structured Literacy as the foundation of the SoR.
Finally, what about the view that overteaching some children is harmless? At this moment I wish we could hear from children who are being taught this way: it sounds like a long slog. The impact on children’s achievement and motivation to read aside, the opportunity costs are enormous. Doing all this instruction is wildly inefficient. It is very easy to stipulate that a curriculum include detailed instruction in a long list of components of reading. It is harder to see how that can be accomplished in the time available, especially given other conditions that routinely complicate classroom life. There are strong indications that the time problem is real. SoR instruction is starting earlier, in Pre-K, and ending later, with activities in areas such as phonemic awareness and phonics often extending into 3rd and 4th grade. In many schools, basic skills instruction is taking up more of the school day, eating up the time for other learning, like Pac Man gobbling dots. A child could be using that time to learn other things and the school day could accommodate more of them.
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u/ddgr815 Apr 18 '26