A theory of justice

Education inequality is reading inequality. Reducing this is possible and overdue

In 1971, philosopher John Rawls proposed a thought experiment: if you were designing society without knowing who you would be in it, what would you want society to look like? Rawl believed the uncertainty would drive us to design society for those with the least opportunity; a just society makes the condition of the worst off as good as possible. This insight is particularly relevant to education because children confront huge inequalities of entry, input, and exit.

I make the case for fixing reading as the biggest lever for fixing education inequality because reading is upstream from the other two pillars of the 3 R's of a strong foundation: arithmetic and writing. Once you learn to read, you can read to learn.

The challenges of fixing reading start with assessing it against defined standards. Unanimity is elusive, but global consensus for Grade 5 reading is around F&P levels S–V, evaluating three skills: oral reading fluency (decoding words and sentences to read in flow), comprehension (understanding what it says), and inferencing (making sense of connecting the content to yourself, the world, and other knowledge).

The lowest of the three becomes the assessed capability, and it uses books with complex context and meaning, varied genres, prose or poetry, and rich vocabulary and grammatical structure. Book choices do vary, but I pick Wonder by RJ Pallacio or Ahimsa by Supriya Kelkar. (Fountas and Pinnell, or F&P, form the guide to choosing and using books from kindergarten through middle school.)

ASER’s 2023 research gives us invaluable data about India: Massive differences exist between states, but public education enrollment has grown to 73%, less than 40% of children tested in Grade 5 can read a Grade 2 level text, and only one in four can read simple sentences. And this, when the test for Grade 5 reading has short sentences and a simple paragraph equating to F&P level A or C at best; guided readers are used globally for kindergarten. What chance at equality do these children have, even if they could all read at this level?

Quality of teaching and limiting reading expectations to textbooks are combined challenges that lead to this reality. Our teachers are not trained to build the literacy skills essential in the first stage of the NEP 5+3+3+4 framework. Children who cannot read textbooks by Grade 3, or the second stage, get left behind forever. Seamless sequencing of content and pedagogy is essential for capturing the ‘explosion of language’ in what Maria Montessori called the ‘sensitive period’ for language, which requires rapidly growing vocabulary from speaking and listening to reading and then writing. Even our trained teachers lack this capability, and EY Parthenon’s 2021 report says around 50% of our teachers are untrained.

Textbooks for our primary schools have simple text and repetitive content, often learned by rote. India has the third largest volume of printed books, but 95% are textbooks (these have doubled since 2015), but this does not improve our benchmarks of foundational literacy. Educational books account for between 30 and 40% of the print volume in most Western countries and even some Asian countries. Japan has a rich reading culture and is an outlier at just 10%. It's hard to unpack whether the problem with leisure reading is supply or demand in India, but research suggests children's leisure reading has a direct correlation with PISA test scores.

Expenditure on literature is understandably a wealth test for countries, but patterns emerge. The UK is much higher than the US per capita, with an intellectual heritage that values books. Germany does better than Austria, and both do better than Italy, Spain, or Turkey. China ranks pretty low (though surprisingly does well on PISA), close to South Africa, and both are still higher than India. The highest country on the scale is Norway. In India, publishing in 'Indian' languages has gained momentum only recently; maybe this will change reading patterns by influencing the quantity and quality of books in the language of their community.

Building reading equality needs five urgent interventions: literacy teaching practice, prioritising reading in school (and homes), reimagining assessments, public-private partnerships, and building community spaces for reading. We must change teacher practise through retraining via workshopping, structured skill assessments, and scaffolding of tool kits and sequenced resources to achieve foundational literacy by Grade 2. We must prioritise reading at school beyond Grade 3. We must model leisure reading at home. We must reimagine middle and high school assessments to allow for timetables and curriculum that enable individualised and research-based reading that nurtures curiosity, critical thinking, and readiness for college and careers. We must create public-private partnerships that provide resources that are not hardware-tied but partner for multi-year software fixes. Finally, philanthropy and government-funded programmes are needed to create physical community spaces with books and more children's litfests because reading is a solitary habit that is sustained when community builds around it.

Rawls’ Theory of Justice suggests the principles of basic equal liberty and equal opportunity only work when the inequalities are handled to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society. Every good teacher knows that there is no difference between children who don’t read and those who can’t read. They also know that in a world where ChatGPT has become an untraceable intellectual forklift, the most powerful tool for lifelong learning is reading. Intergenerational justice demands handling reading inequality for millions of children to equalise the start line so that they can begin to dream of equality. Paraphrasing my favourite speaker, Brene Brown, reading is a portal to meaning-making, connection, learning, and self-awareness that can open up entire universes. Let the journey to reading equality begin.

(The writer is the head of school and founder of Neev Academy.)