The Science of Reading more or less confirms something that I’ve thought for a long time about teaching reading: ultimately, to get better at reading you just have to read more books and spend more time practicing. There’s no shortcut, no magic way to get better. The “reading wars” over phonics and encoding have been fought and re-fought every couple years, but the important thing is for people to read.

Of course, this is still a terribly difficult problem to solve. It is a question of access: who has the money to purchase books or is close enough to a library that they can borrow them? It is a question of time: who has the time outside of work, school, care work, and other obligations to sit down and read a book? Turns out, like with many issues regarding education and opportunities, the answer lies in removing barriers to access and improving economic security.

The other thing I noticed was that like all branches of science that start to dig into the nature of thinking and intelligence, the history of reading science is rife with racist and misogynistic aims: many of the names that Johns mentions belong to people who held a deeply racist belief in eugenics, which I found disquieting. While every branch of science—and indeed every field and profession—has its share of bad actors, they stand out more to me in the sciences that study humans specifically.