by Eva van Loon

Neuroscientists who study the human brain have pointed out a basic fact about homo sapiens babies that the long-standing arguments about nature vs nurture seem to have missed: there isn’t a single human culture on the face of the planet that doesn’t employ speech (or music, for that matter), but there are plenty of cultures, including Canada’s First Nations, that depended solely on oral transmission of culture and did not care two hoots about becoming a literate society.

There’s a good reason for that, which is where neuroscience comes in: human biology is geared for speech, but not for reading. Unlike other animals, we have a larynx that drops down at six to eight months of age to a place in our throats where we can use it, and it contains some remarkably useful short slabs of flesh we have chosen to call vocal chords. Pretty soon, we start exercising them to imitate the sounds of the adults in our tribe, and voila! Language. It all happens thanks to biological destiny with respect to speech (and music). Although languages differ from group to group, all humans talk. All they have to do is move certain parts of the body in imitation of senior group members. One can’t begin reading just by moving eyes and fingers, however. No human will learn to read without being taught.

Speech is nature; reading is nurture.

Orality is human nature; literacy is human nurture.

Think about that in the context of North American history over the last five centuries. A passel of oral human cultures is doing just fine, apparently more or less in balance with the rest of the ecology. (Some civilisations, like the Maya, collapsed into themselves, probably because they cut all their trees down—oh, wait a minute! That was a literate society. Hmmm…. ) Then, along come boatloads of Europeans, full of themselves as a literate, and therefore superior, culture. Literacy made them technologically stronger. And, some would say, history’s been all downhill from there.

One could view the history of North America as a scene of Europeans trying, for the most part unsuccessfully, to “gift” the oral cultures they found into literate cultures. For some, like the Cherokee, that went well—until they because too successful. For other groups, it’s been a painful process, even a non-starter. There’s no motivating force behind the effort to become literate beyond getting a job, something one didn’t need in the past and which nowadays seems of dubious security and value. If you have a good thing going, why add to your difficulties only to reduce your quality of life in the end?
When keeping in mind the fact that speech is nature but literacy is nurture, teachers would naturally teach from nature to nurture, right? From the way the language sounds, to the way the language looks on the page? That would be the way to maximise the aha! of recognition as the students discover on the page the very sounds already heard and internalised. But that method never, to this day, happens in schools. Save for the ESL schools and the tiniest sprinkle of phonemic-awareness methods, all schools still teach reading from the way the language looks on the page to the way it sounds—that is, by phonics and sight-say methods. It’s a completely cerebral method. Instead of using the body to learn a language, as all humans are geared to do, we’re asked to use our heads, to think about it.

This is especially crazy-making when the language in question is English, one of the planet’s least logical tongues. English contains encyclopedias of history which have bequeathed it with a prize collection of homonyms, thousands of words from other languages, hundreds of crazy codes (spellings), and corruptions, ellipses, and dialects galore. Lexicographers have devised books of logical rules for using English, books in which the exceptions to the rules take up more room than the rules themselves.

Now you see why asking a ten-year-old to bring logic to bear on English spelling is asking for trouble.