Formation Before Fixing:
Aletheia’s Better Way to Teach
A response to current professional development trends in literacy remediation.
Context & Source
This reflection was prompted by Caitlynn Peetz Stephens’ article, “Teachers Need Help Reaching Teens Who Missed Basic Reading Skills. Can PD Help?” published in Education Week on November 24, 2025. Stephens documents a growing reality across U.S. school districts: large numbers of middle and high school students lack basic reading proficiency, and school systems are now investing heavily in teacher professional development to repair what was never formed in earlier years.
When a System Must Rebuild What It Never Formed
There is an ache quietly threaded through Stephens’ reporting: an ache we have grown too accustomed to ignoring. Decades into compulsory schooling, we are still discovering that children arrive in adolescence unable to read—not unwilling, not apathetic, but unformed. And so, the system responds in the only way it knows how: with programs, retraining, and scalable interventions.
We assemble task forces. We retrain adults who were trained by institutions that never trained them well in the first place. We create entire professional-development economies to compensate for what formation should have produced in the earliest years. In fact, there are now entire professional-development industries that exist to compensate for the absence of early formation. What strikes me is not the effort, because the effort is earnest and humanely intended, but the underlying assumption: that education can be dislocated from relationship, that formation may be outsourced, and that skills may be substituted for shepherding.
The article is filled with language like implementation, intervention, scaling, delivery of content, modules, and compliance requirements. These are the words of institutions, not of discipleship. They reveal a system attempting to retrofit what should have been woven long before a child ever walked into a building. In that sense, this article is not merely a report: it is a symptom.
Formation Cannot Be Repaired—It Must Be Stewarded
In biblical pedagogy, reading is not first a technical act. It is covenantal. It is the means by which the people of God learn to remember, obey, and love.
This language does not describe remediation. It describes early relational formation: parents speaking, children imitating, and truth being absorbed through life, not just through lessons. Children who learn to read in the context of intimacy, imitation, and story rarely arrive at adolescence afraid of language. They have already encountered words as belonging, not barriers.
Government schools now face an impossible dilemma: to retroactively kindle what was never kindled, using structures built for efficiency, not for formation. Reading, historically and biblically, was an act of belonging before it was an act of skill. Children learned to read because they learned to remember: to inherit the story of God, their family, their identity, and their responsibility. When learning is relational, habitual, and meaningful, grounded in worship, memory, practice, and imitation, literacy becomes natural fruit rather than a late-stage emergency. No amount of retraining can replace what formation was meant to accomplish.
Where the Article Reveals Hope
There is a quiet humility in the teachers who say, “We don’t know how to do this, but we want to learn.” That humility is precious. It reveals that even inside systems shaped by bureaucracy, many adults still sense the sacredness of their task. The work of learning how the brain reads (decoding, morphology, fluency) is necessary. It aligns with truth: God designed the mind to learn language ordered, sequentially, and relationally, not by guessing, guessing again, and hoping meaning emerges.
So yes—train teachers. Equip them. Give them tools grounded in cognitive science rather than fashionable pedagogy, but let us also be honest: training alone will not heal the core fracture, because reading is not primarily a skill to be rescued in adolescence. It is a relationship to truth that must be cultivated in childhood.
The renewed interest in structured literacy, decoding, morphology, and the science of reading is a needed course correction. Truth about how the mind learns language matters. Phonics matters. Precision matters. But while these tools may restore skills, they do not restore confidence, identity, or the deep love of language that grows when a child is nurtured, not remediated.
A Deeper Wound Beneath the Data
Behind every statistic stands a child who has silently internalized: “Everyone else can understand something I can’t.” That wound is not academic: it is formative. It requires patience, relationship, and dignity, not acceleration plans or downloadable modules. Remediation may improve metrics, but only formation restores the learner.
This kind of wound does not heal with phonics alone. It heals through belonging, patience, and being seen, not as a data point or deficiency, but as an image-bearer. This is why education cannot be reduced to systems. Systems may reinforce learning, but they cannot replace formation. Truth must be lived with the learner, not merely delivered at them.
Aletheia’s Distinct Proposition: Formation Before Intervention
The prevailing educational model, even in its attempts to repair itself, assumes learning happens primarily through institutional expertise, compliance training, and program alignment. It begins with systems and adds relationship later if time allows. Aletheia begins differently.
- We begin with a biblical anthropology: every learner is an image-bearer, relationally formed, designed for meaning, belonging, and wisdom.
- We begin with family-rooted learning rhythms, not institutional pacing guides.
- We begin with memory, story, worship, and imitation, not remediation strategies.
- We form teachers not as technicians delivering curriculum but as shepherds discipling souls—equipped in the science of learning, but governed by Scripture, love, and the partnership of home and community.
Aletheia asks: “How do we ensure children are never fragmented in the first place?”
The Way Forward
Professional development may indeed help older students; praise God when it does. No child is beyond hope or capacity. The Lord rebuilds what human systems have neglected. But if we are to prevent the need for constant academic triage, the future of Christian education must not imitate the logic of intervention culture. It must restore formation.
- Formation that begins early.
- Formation that is relational.
- Formation that shapes not only skill, but love, identity, and wisdom.
Because education is not the mass transfer of content. It is the slow cultivation of the human soul to know truth, treasure goodness, and recognize beauty. That work, the work Aletheia exists to steward, is not too late to rebuild. Imagine instead:
- Children learning to read beside parents, siblings, and mentors—not screens.
- Words encountered through worship, story, craftsmanship, observation—not drills alone.
- Adolescents entering adulthood not as products of remediation, but as young men and women who have been discipled in attentiveness, vocabulary, memory, and meaning.
This is what Theopaideia proposes: not a more efficient institution, but a restored ecology of learning rooted in Scripture, family, and community. We do not merely need better professional development; we need reformation; not because teachers have failed, but because the system replaced formation with administration, and relationship with standardization, and wisdom with technique.
A Final Word of Hope
The Lord is patient. Children who were not formed early may yet be formed late. Adults who were not trained well may yet become wise teachers. And a culture that has forgotten how to disciple may yet remember.
But if we are to repair what has been lost, we must begin not with programs, but with repentance; not with new mandates, but with renewed vision. Education is not ultimately the transmission of information. It is the shaping of souls to love what is true. And that work, God’s work, is never too late to begin.
Reference
Stephens, C. P. (2025, November 24). Teachers need help reaching teens who missed basic reading skills. Can PD help? Education Week.