ABSTRACT
We sometimes forget how difficult some children find the initial stages of reading. We are therefore tempted to ignore the difficulty. Something that appears to be so obvious to us, and which causes such difficulties in others, is at the heart of the dilemmas of teaching. Where does one begin to diagnose and explain? So much learning is instinctive that instructions, even the clearest of explanations, can pass the pupil by. Learning to read has its distinct problems. It is an analogy for learning generally, since the process is not so much a steady accumulation of facts and ideas as the learning of discrimination, between clues that are significant and those that are not. Learning and knowing what not to learn have a close and ambiguous relationship. Often, learning not to learn is a result.
