Reading Readiness: Literacy as Ontological Apprenticeship: 1 The Ontology of Reading

A child sits before a page.

Black marks gather on white space — lines, loops, flickers of potential. She stares, silent. The room is still except for her breathing. Nothing yet “means,” yet everything leans toward meaning. This is readiness — the poised tension between the world’s inclination to say and her capacity to hear.

1 — Reading as Attunement

We are taught to imagine reading as decoding, as the extraction of meaning from text. But that is a convenience of pedagogy, not a truth of experience. The act of reading is not retrieval but entry: a moment of alignment with a field already alive with construal. The page offers an opening, not a container.

To read is to tune oneself to the patterning of potential — to feel how marks and pauses, traces and gaps, invite a pulse of understanding. Reading is the field’s own resonance: meaning actualising through the one who reads. In that moment, the reader is not outside the text but inside the world’s reflexive movement, participating in its coherence.

2 — Readiness as the World’s Inclination to Mean

“Readiness” names this mutual leaning of world and reader. It is not a psychological state or a pre-skill; it is an ontological tension. The world inclines toward articulation, and the reader is the local inflection of that inclination. The field’s potential seeks construal; the reader’s attention provides the cut through which it becomes event.

In this sense, reading is not what humans do to language, but what the symbolic field does through humans. Every reader is a temporary convergence of inclinations — the world’s urge to express and the mind’s capacity to yield.

3 — Construal as Event, not Process

When we say “the child learns to read,” we imagine a gradual acquisition of skills. But construal is not procedural; it is perspectival. Reading happens as an instantaneous shift — the cut from potential to instance. Before the cut, marks are mere pattern; after it, they are meaning. What has changed is not the ink, but the angle of relation.

In our ontology, system is the theory of possible instances; reading is the event in which that theory momentarily finds form. The reader does not decode the text but stands at the junction where the world’s potential and its actualisation coincide. To read is to witness that reflexive fold.

4 — Implications for Literacy Education

If reading is attunement, then literacy education cannot be about mechanical mastery. To “teach reading” is to cultivate sensitivity to construal — to foster readiness in the field of relation. Exercises that treat reading as symbol manipulation train dexterity but not resonance. What matters is the learner’s felt coherence with meaning itself — the rhythm of how the world becomes articulate through her.

In this light, the educator is less instructor than field-tuner, adjusting the gradients of offering so that inclination and ability meet. The goal is not correctness, but coherence: the capacity to dwell where understanding is possible.

5 — The Page as Threshold

Return to the child before the page. The marks have not changed, yet they now pulse with life. She no longer looks at them but through them. The page is no longer surface but threshold, where the world reads itself into being.

Reading is readiness fulfilled — not the mastery of meaning, but the participation in its ongoing emergence. The world does not merely contain words; it becomes them, again and again, in every act of reading.