My daughter Karen,atteded a tiny village school. She could read THE TIMES aged 6,[ but not the city pages
]. 65 years ago,I started a real reading programme aged four and a half. Did we sit still----You bet we did!

David Vinter, Louth, Lincs., UK..

Sadly, there are still too many teachers in the system who treat teaching as a job with good holidays and guaranteed retirement pension. They show little joy or enthusiasm in front of the children and are only too happy when the liberal left put no pressure on the establishment to hide the national standards their plupils achieve.

We need both 'push' (parents taking an interest and providing good role models) and 'pull' economics ie the teachers being publically held to account for their pupils' standards. Get back to the old style of Ofsted inspecting where all teachers are observed and graded accordingly and these results are fed back during the inspection + league tables indicating value added, absolute attainment and the attainment of different groups as proposed - giftedand talented at primary and secondary (end of Key Stages 2 and 3)

sk, East Sussex,

As a teacher of Junior School (7-11) children, I have always felt that we insist the children learn academicly far too young. Especially the boys who are only interested in doing and not sitting still and thinking. The great pity is that the head start programs encourage the view that the child is a failure if they can't master these skills.

Not all boys are thus, but a lot of them are and it is difficult to teach and motivate a class where there is a fairly high proportion of the active boys. All they want to do is run about and will even skip their dinners for the joy of doing so.

Most all the children will tell you that the purpose of education is to get a good job so they can earn lots of money. This gave me insight, but also broke my heart. I loved learning for learning's sake. I am not competitive. I think I was rare.

Perhaps because we live in such an overcrowded society we come to this view. Give me a starving Armenian and they can happily eat the liver on my plate!

Carlyle Braden, Croydon, U.K.

Sadly, similar things happen to children in non-English speaking world.

China Tang, Beijing, P.R. China

The article fails to point out that parents carry the greatest responsibility when it comes to teaching children to read and write. No one can become a great writer unless they first become a great reader.

We suffer from much the same here in the US. Too many parents refuse to turn off the television and read to or with their children. Too many parents permit their children to waste endless hours playing video games and absorbing tripe from the internet.

Years ago, the hot fad in reading was a program called "Whole Language," in which students were expected to guess at the pronunciation and meaning of words. It failed miserably. It was much less effective than the traditional phonetic system that it briefly replaced and has since replaced "WL."

My parents sent us four children to school to add to our education. School was never seen as the only source of intellectual advancement.

The failures of an educational system merely reflect the failures of the entire society.

Mark, Lufkin, Texas, USA

Back in 1988 our team warned that 50% of 7-8 year olds had not yet developed the visual memory storage capacity necessary for whole word processing. That warning identified a massive flaw in the heart of infant teaching methods.
Our warning went unheeeded but the detailed predictions that we made at that time are now confirmed both by the incidence of reading errors and by the specific type of error patterns seen.
At the heart of the problem lies the philosophical antagonism from by teacher unions to testing discreet reading skills including phonic deficits and the adherance to flawed educational philosophy by almost all teacher training centres.
B Harrison
Research Director
VAS Research
Australia

Byron Harrison, Kingston, TASmania 7050, Australia

Regular scrutiny of the "Have Your Say" readers' comment section confirms widespread illiteracy, inability to spell and difficulties with the most basic sentence construction. And this is The Times!

Bob, St Albans, UK

The shear mass of the schooling machine cannot respond to any instant fix, yet if nothing is done another generation of children could pass the school gates with a sense of betrayal before any change could be made.

The curriculum could be adjusted as the writers suggest with two streams. A streamlined version to equip children with the essentials and an extended version for the brighter children. But perhaps great parental involvement should also be considered. Modern teaching resources used in school, mostly in educational games format are ideal for practice at home. Parents could be given support and encouragement to spend time at home to go over some of the lesson content using these games. Far more fun than conventional homework and far more productive.

This additional resource would positively impact on performance without impinging on the schools resources.

Alistair Owens

Alistair Owens, Doncaster, UK

"The Scottish government said it was focusing on early intervention in schools"

Scotland doesn't have a 'Scottish government', it has the "Scottish Executive", at least, that's what our un-elected Scottish PM says.

Michael, Brighton,