The Hidden Danger of Teaching Your Child to Read

Everyone talks about how important it is to teach your children to read, but the dark underbelly of preschool phonics is rarely, if ever discussed. I learned the hard way that a child that can read Green Eggs and Ham also has the ability to sound out the four-letter words that are scrawled onto the backs of train and bus seats with a black Sharpie.

Last Saturday, my family escaped from the profane literary world of Philadelphia's public transportation system to the safety of the city's anatomy museum, a place where all of the exhibits' placards are written either in vocabularies too advanced for my three five year-olds, or in a language (Latin) completely foreign to them.

As it turns out, my efforts to prevent insurgent readership was unnecessary: my kids were far too busy examining the museum's treasures--including jars of fetuses with congenital abnormalities and wax molds of half-corroded faces, butts, and armpits caused by syphilis--to be bothered with the written material posted underneath or next to the displays.

While a vast collection of human skulls served as the museum's focal point, the real prize was a roomful of body parts floating in jars of formaldehyde. I was showing my sons a collection of noses when my daughter pointed to a jar containing a shriveled pickle.
"What's that?" she asked.
I read the placard and answered, "A severed finger."
I turned back to the nostrils, but not before my daughter screamed "Liar!" in my face.
"That's not a finger," she said authoritatively, gesturing to a 5x7 sign. "It's a penis. P-E-N-I-S."

Needless to say, all interest in facial cartilage instantly evaporated.