The Teacher Who Couldn’t Read, Book Review and Springboard

    I was browsing recorded books when I came across this title, The Teacher Who Couldn't Read, by John Corcoran and Carol C. Carlson. A few days prior, an old friend and new acquaintance on Facebook had posted this priceless piece of doggerel to which I wanted to reply (especially about education), but resisted. In the background, I have been preoccupied with our own children's first year of homeschooling, the difficulties and the progress they have made. At first, I passed over the book about the illiterate teacher, opting instead for light science and history during my daily commute. But the title got in my craw for several days. I looked it up on Amazon and read the reviews. To my amazement, eleven of twelve reviews were positive. Only one review in twelve criticized the author for his checkered past, particularly for lying and cheating his way through his own education. The rest treated the author as a hero who had overcome adversity, and if he had done anything wrong in the past, it was only because he was a victim of inattentive parents, poor schooling, and—presumably—dyslexia. I thought about my own U.S. public school education, the drivel that passed for education and the focus on anything but book learning. I thought about a recent college visit my 10^th grader and I made to my alma mater, one of the better state universities in the country, and to which I wouldn't send my dog unless he wanted to be a linebacker. The more I thought about education, both our recent experiences as homeschooling parents and my own education, the more I realized I had to read that book. I went back and got it several days later.

     My instinctive response to the title was, "What nerve! What a fraud!" I did not approach this book with a sympathetic ear to the author. Not surprisingly, though the book was written in the first person, Mr. Corcoran was not the author; he had a ghostwriter, Carol C. Carlson. I did not protest the use of a ghostwriter except for the pretense of the story being told by Mr. Corcoran himself. The recorded book version was also read by a professional reader. My suspicion was that the title character bore a Glamour Shots-type of resemblance to the real person. Okay, this was Hollywood or Madison Avenue—actually it was Colorado Springs (Focus on the Family). No big deal. A little shining and buffing never hurt anyone. But the smooth and polished writing bothered me enough to go to You Tube to hear Mr. Corcoran speak. Well, the real person and the recorded book were similar enough to hear the resemblance, though the book's author came across as more nuanced and intelligent. Nonetheless, because Focus on the Family had listed the coauthor/ghostwriter on the cover, I was satisfied. It seemed that the now literate and born-again John Corcoran had some integrity. I decided to read/listen on.

    Immediately, it struck me that, though Mr. Corcoran was eager to provide excuses for his parents, they bore the brunt of the responsibility for his illiteracy as a child. His parents were both literate and reasonably educated (his father was a college graduate and teacher, mother was a high school graduate; both were readers). But it seemed like they didn't take enough time with his reading as a young student. Mr. Corcoran's early education involved multiple moves, three different schools in first grade alone. At school, he slipped through the cracks, understandable in his circumstances. But at home, no one appeared to be paying attention—neither his brooding mother nor his capricious father. Of course, Mr. Corcoran was hesitant to use harsh words concerning his parents' shortcomings. With the general public and Evangelical audience in mind, this was a prudent choice for this book. To me, however, his tone came across as sour grapes, simultaneously justifying his parents' inattention and inwardly wishing they could have done better. I'm not so inclined to excuse his parents from culpability. I found his father's behavior particularly troubling and self-serving. For example, his father was frequently changing jobs, and it was hard to imagine these moves were always necessary or beneficial. As much as Mr. Corcoran tried to sugarcoat his family, the facts seemed to shine through. I got the impression that, if it weren't for his parents' self-involved obliviousness, young John Corcoran would have learned to read.

    His school life was worse than his home life. Mr. Corcoran grew up in the Southwest. He started in the public schools, which failed at launching his education. After several years and relocations, he eventually went to parochial school. There, he attended class with many Hispanic children who were not only struggling with learning to read, but also grappling with learning English. In accord with the anti-Catholic tone of Focus on the Family, he told several negative experiences with Catholic schools (though the tales of being hit on the knuckles with a yardstick were missing). Mr. Corcoran recounted learning something about God in Catholic school, but he didn't understand the ritual or the Sacraments. And he told one obligatory tale of sexual abuse in which nothing actually happened but could have occurred had he not been vigilant. I was neither surprised nor unsympathetic nor convinced by the story of sexual abuse that wasn't. It was merely as predictable as his father's next move, which typically occurred just as the boy was starting to make progress. Toward the end of elementary school, John Corcoran went to a public school where progressive education was the norm. Under the tutelage of progressive educators, Mr. Corcoran was freed from the shackles of literate education. He was free to explore learning as experience, as social interaction, as group discussion. Though he retained some fondness for progressive education, he also admitted that progressive education virtually eliminated the expectation of literacy.

    By middle school and high school, Mr. Corcoran capitalized on, in my opinion, the biggest travesty in the American educational system—school sponsored sporting teams. Though he downplayed the advantages of sports, playing football and basketball helped him to be passed over from one grade to the next. Again, he had a stint of Catholic high school, which sounded a bit more arduous. But by high school, Mr. Corcoran was adept at flirting and getting girls to do his homework.

    After high school, he spent several years in community college, though he was still unable to read. I would guess that he as at that time was around a 2^nd or 3^rd grade reading level, though he insinuated that it was much worse than that. Undeterred, he developed various strategies for getting through, some legal and others not. By the time he went to a college in Texas on a basketball scholarship, he was a full-fledged cheat. He broke into teachers' offices and stole tests. Again, his athleticism likely allowed professors and administrators to overlook his behaviors.

    After college, Mr. Corcoran taught and coached in the California public school system for seventeen years. He developed a variety of techniques for hiding his illiteracy. Mostly, he used teacher's aides--smart students who led class, took role, and graded tests. (Many of my own public high school teachers employed these same methods.) He also taught a variety of courses through group discussion. He was a strong practitioner of progressive education. For example, he recorded the mini-series "Roots" and showed it in class. Discussion followed. (My own teachers used similar tactics.) Mr. Corcoran was hard-pressed to say that he was a "bad teacher," simply because he couldn't read. I felt that he lacked the courage to make this leap.

    After teaching, he went into real estate and property management, made a lot of money, but eventually filed for bankruptcy. In a period of despair, he finally entered an adult literacy program and learned to read. He learned to read through phonics, and he made a strong case for teaching phonics, proper English, and English-language education. On these points, he was clear and genuine. A few years after developing his basic reading skills, he became engaged in something like a combination of speech therapy and literacy combined. He had to learn and relearn his basic phonemes—watching his lips and tongue, listening to the sounds, and reading the letters simultaneously. (Oddly, this was the same technique I used to teach myself how to pronounce French phonemes.) It seemed that, without literacy as a youth, Mr. Corcoran had developed his own idiosyncratic ways of speaking and hearing. Working on these basic skills proved a major breakthrough for him. He reported that his reading level is now somewhere around the 8^th grade equivalency, hardly commensurate with his education but similar to an average adult American today.

    On the whole, the book was better than I expected. I left with a greater appreciation for the struggles of people, young or old, who cannot read. But I also had two serious misgivings. First, this book was an unabashed advertisement for the adult literacy movement. This I didn't mind, so much, except I didn't think that's where the focus needed to be. Adult literacy, it seemed to me, was like fixing recalls on automobiles without changing the manufacturing process of new ones. As important as remediation of adults who cannot read is, clearly there is something seriously wrong with the public education system in the United States. If there were only one teacher in America who could not read, then we would have serious problems. I suspect there are others. A teacher who cannot read cannot teach students to read, thus my dismay at the eleven in twelve positive reviews for this book. I applaud John Corcoran for learning how to read at age 48. But I cannot reconcile his audacity for being a teacher for seventeen years. I kept imagining what my grandparents' generation might have said about such a teacher. They wouldn't have been so kind or offered excuses. In recent decades, Americans have lost both common sense and common decency. Yes, John Corcoran has redeemed himself as an individual by conquering the demon of illiteracy. But as an educator, he has not even begun to reconcile the damage he has done. He was not merely a victim of illiteracy; he was a perpetrator of illiteracy.

     My second misgiving related to the testimonial aspect of Mr. Corcoran's story. As a traditional Catholic, I found Mr. Corcoran's conversion from lukewarm Catholicism to non-denominational Christianity both disappointing and predictable. Mr. Corcoran found vague generalities and feel-good spirituality more palatable than the ritual and dogma of Catholic faith. He's not entirely critical of the Catholic Church because clearly the priests and nuns did teach him about God. Throughout the story, even as a young child, John Corcoran prayed to God to learn to read. But the young John Corcoran was loathe to do precisely what Martin Luther first sought to destroy—he could not confess his sin, not to another human being, and certainly not to a priest in the confessional. Yes, I meant to say that his illiteracy was a sin! After all, it was his illiteracy that led him to a lifestyle of lying, cheating, stealing, and defrauding. John Corcoran was able to talk to God about his problem, his not being able to read, but he was unable to utter a word to another human being (except later his wife). This, it seems to me, is a fundamental flaw of not only Protestantism, but most Protestants. By doing away with the human intermediary for confession and the divine personification of reconciliation, Protestants warp the essential meaning and value of Christianity. In practice, this does not necessarily mean that Catholics are better people than Protestants, but it does imply that Catholics are more apt to admit when they are wrong. This corresponds with my life experience. In all honesty, I have scarcely known a Protestant who was readily willing to admit when he had done wrong. And so it seemed with John Corcoran.

     For example, I was amazed when Mr. Corcoran admitted that he had been married almost twenty years before he ever apologized to his wife. This was his primary character flaw—the inability to admit his weaknesses. Though his parents, schools, and language impediment may have been responsible for his not learning to read initially, the responsibility for his illiteracy through nearly a half a century was clearly his. He was not able to address his problem until he got honest—not just with himself and with God, but also with another human being. He credits his religious conversion for his increased honesty. I would say that his religious conversion may have been a step in the right direction because he was never really Catholic from the start. Clearly, a schoolboy who could have said, "Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa," would have addressed the problem much sooner.