Volume 29, Number 5 · April 1, 1982
Reading for Signs of Life
By Jerome S. Bruner
On Learning to Read: The Child's Fascination with Meaning
by Bruno Bettelheim, by Karen Zelan
Knopf, 306 pp., $13.95
If this astonishing book is correct, then it must surely bear the most extraordinary news about the nature of the mind to have come our way in decades. For it concludes that children can read unconsciously with little difficulty. Troubles arise only when they must do so consciously. And the troubles are not in response to the technical difficulties involved in reading, in decoding texts, but in the inane reading matter set before children in combination with the advertent or inadvertent callousness of teachers who insist upon their reading it against their wishes. On this account, reading difficulties are an extension of ego defenses. Remove the conditions against which the child is defending himself, and the technical difficulties will wither away. Once the unconscious is shed of its fears, conscious reading will no longer lag.
Review, 2689 words
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