Early reading instruction is important for all children, but especially for the disadvantaged, because the decision not to expose them to reading at an early age may result in an unrecoverable loss of intellectual potential. Reading readiness as an approach may exile children from literacy permanently because it is an abstract and alien process that risks losing a child's psychological commitment to reading. Naming colors, mastering letter names, matching rhyming words, identifying vowel sounds, matching nonsense syllables, and other readiness activities are not prerequisites for reading. Research shows that children can learn to read without readiness instruction, and in fact, children can fail a readiness test and yet be fully capable of reading. Readiness skills are both harder to teach and harder to acquire than reading itself. Readiness is a harmful exercise, especially for disadvantaged children, and it imparts the message that reading is like readiness--unfathomable in terms of the child's present world and inapplicable in terms of what the child perceives as his or her future needs. Early reading, however, lacks the mystical quality of readiness, and is comprehensible to the child since it begins at the word level and can be immediately used. (SRT)