Primary School, Middle School & Literacy Redefined

Primary and Middle School lay the foundation for higher-level, evidence-based thinking.

The significance of early-childhood development through age six is widely recognized as a crucial stage in the most basic physical, cognitive, and social skills. But the parallel importance of primary school and middle school in academic success and intellectual development is not similarly acknowledged. The best educational experience at the primary-school level lays the foundation for more advanced skills required in high school. The best primary-school education will train younger students in the rudiments of higher-level competences.

What Essay Engineering materials or books can primary school and middle school students learn from?

While current Essay Engineering books are primarily indicated for high school and college students, there are major elements which are suitable for middle school students, namely the materials on sentence-level meaning construction and the methods for passage analysis and creating a meaning pattern to identify the structuring principle of an episode. These methods are prior to and foundational for essay composition, which is not possible without sentence-level meaning reconstruction and a grasp of the structuring principle. A textbook tailored for middle-school level is in development.

For younger students in primary school, a textbook for developing early-stage Essay Engineering skills is also in development. This curriculum will concentrate on sentence-level meaning reconstruction. And, while this topic is covered in the high school and college level textbook, the materials for primary school students teach the same skill at a much lower level of semantic complexity.

Only “semantic literacy” improves reading comprehension, since “mechanical literacy” is not concerned with meaning.

Primary school is, of course, essential for teaching the basic, elementary skill of mechanical literacy: the ability to recognize the letters and meaning of the written word, and the ability to construct simple sentences of low complexity. But there is a second kind of literacy, namely semantic literacy, which is the understanding of the actual meaning of words (whether of a sentence, paragraph, chapter, or entire book). Semantic literacy is the only way to achieve 100% reading comprehension, it is the primary element of higher-level evidence-based thinking. Without semantic literacy and related meaning reconstruction skills, reading comprehension levels remain in the 20 to 60% range. Conventional wisdom might hold that the denoted meaning of a sentence is self-evident and always understood. But the presumption that semantic literacy is by its nature self-evident is mistaken, contravened as it is by standard high-school reading assignments (and in some cases not even for primary school reading material).

With the right curriculum, younger students (3rd to 7th grade) are able to very rapidly acquire semantic literacy and the fundamental skills of evidence-based thinking because they have not accumulated the conventional bad habits of passive reading, imprecise written expression, and unstructured, disorganized thought. In contrast, older students (9th to 12th grade) face the challenge that they must ‘unlearn’ the haphazard habits acquired during the middle school years when classroom experience seldom exhausts the potential for education – in either the intellectual potential of the student or the curricular possibilities of instruction. And, while the typical student has very capably mastered elementary mechanical literacy (the basic, mechanical skill of recognizing letters and words on a page, and writing complete sentences), it is during the intermediate stage (5th to 8th grade) that even talented students can struggle with the meaning of semantically complex sentences and fall behind – precisely because semantic literacy is not taught in the standard humanities curriculum.

These students must play “catch-up” – and the ninth-grader in this situation faces a double challenge. In ongoing schoolwork, the student must complete assignments that require intermediate and advanced skills of semantic literacy. While in actual intellectual development, the student has never learned the essential beginner skills of semantic literacy. For this reason, it is best for students to start the Essay Engineering curriculum in primary school or early middle school. Ultimately, the student who begins with Essay Engineering in the fourth or fifth grade will commit far less time and effort in acquiring fundamental skills, and encounter far less difficulty. The most supportive academic training applies an “ounce of prevention” in the third or sixth grade, to avoid the “pound of cure” in the ninth grade, when it takes far more time and effort to develop basic, fundamental skills.