Shifting into a paradigm, shifting out

I have heard a great number of people promote the great and wonderful attributes of reading and writing.  There is no doubt that the two have advanced the cause of knowledge accumulation in the world no matter what the language.  In fact, the two had become a currency among those trained in the two disciplines during the BCE epoch and among educated people since the Middle Ages.

But something happened after World War I with reading and writing.  They began to be confused with language development.  With the rise of the use of psychology as a profession and its ideas about intelligence (tested through the military), the two processes suddenly were tell-tale signs of language development.  After World War II, the application of psychology to intelligence testing continued to grow and was linked to the manifestation of language through reading and writing.

Education after World War II also changed.  Mandatory attendance was enacted, and suddenly, for the first time ever, nearly all children in the U.S. were exposed to a higher level of education than they had received in the country's almost two hundred year history.  But the lines were confused; reading and writing were no longer merely a currency of educated people.  They had slowly but surely become the tool of psychology to represent language development, and thus, an indicator of intelligence.  Ridiculous and crazy ideas resulted, such as the correlation between extensive vocabulary and high intelligence.  For the record, there is a positive correlation (and a higher positive correlation) between music ability and high intelligence, but the schools won't mandate all students to learn reading music.

Reading became a focus at that point, and by the 1970s, an entire new field had sprung up.  Much research began to be done only on reading ability and how it could, would, and should be developed for every child.  The schools became the vehicle to carry out the research, and subsequently, the schools were the vehicle to institute the results of that research.

But, those who are the language scientists had been left out of the loop.  Those scientists knew that language development and reading and writing were separate creatures, not the same, and that reading development didn't really represent language development nor did writing development represent a person's ability to organize and express complex thinking.

What has resulted is a public that thinks the ability to read and write well is the same as language development.  So parents push their children to read at an early age, even before school if at all possible.  And parents of school children get worried when their children let their speech habits interfere with the so-called clearer thinking process of writing.

Fortunately, technology will show the truth that language development is not bound up in reading and writing in about 10 more years.  It will lead the public from their fallacious thinking by permitting several other avenues to be equal vehicles for expressing thought that is clear, organized, and complex.  That will allow language development to turn back to what the genes bring to a person in the first place.  Then, parents can follow their children's development using criteria truly related to language, not related to the overlay of reading or writing runes in books as thought throughout the 1900s and the first decade of the 2000s.