Do you know why your kids prefer computer games to reading? Oh, sure, part of it that they’re more visual, more immediate. But that alone doesn’t explain the decline of reading over the last few decades. No, not even our wretched schools explain that.
For all those decades, our society has told the kids reading was good for them and “important.” They’re not stupid. Of course they don’t want to do that. Now, TV and computer games, those are bad for you and therefore they must be fun, right?
I got told that reading was a time-wasting, no-good folly. I got told books would rot my brain. I got told I thought too much and lived in cloud cuckoo land. And I read every chance I got and in the most unlikely places to do it. I did the same with the kids. It worked.
But I had to fight against the schools. The schools wanted to give them candy and burgers for reading x-number of books. They wanted to make them participate in “readathons.” They wanted to make them feel that reading was difficult and important, and writing was performed by magic creatures with messages or something… At the same time, of course, publishers were selecting for worthiness (sometimes wordiness too, but not often. They tended to be minimalists) and message and “importance.” Is it any wonder fewer people read? It’s a wonder people read at all.
And we need to get the word out: reading is fun. You have to be careful, or you end up doing too much of it, and you don’t sleep enough, and you neglect your work. You learn too much and you think too much, and then you don’t fit in right, and you start finding sitcoms boring and predictable. And then you won’t get your friends’ reference jokes. Oh, sure, you’ll have other reference jokes, but who will you share them with? – gasp! – not those WEIRDOS who read, right? Reading could ruin your life. You know that guy with the disheveled hair and the reddened eyes in your class? Yeah. He looks like he just tumbled out of bed because he didn’t sleep last night. He was up all night reading a book. He’s a bad influence. Stay away from him.
Look, the gatekeepers are still there, but we can get around them. Let’s curl up in the big easy chair with a trashy book and kick off our shoes. I have chocolate with marshmallows, and not a hint of broccoli in sight. (And yes, in future there will be reviews of those trashy books.)
A more wordy (though not necessarily worthy) version of this post is at
According To Hoyt
By the time Deranged Daughter reached the age cohort being offered bribes for reading she was already reading at such a level we spotted this as a freebie offered by suckers and our/her only concern was the best way to damp down the numbers so they’d be credible. At 3 she was sitting in her toy basket at the foot of her bed reading The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe under her 7-watt night light.
The Soviets had a goal of universal literacy — but only so the people could read Party diktats. America is working on that, teaching reading as necessary but only to be done at necessity.
… and aren’t the films a disappointment!
No. The first one was particularly good. The other two were good too, but they had to leave out too much.
I think these films are above and beyond most film adaptations.
Maybe the kids who see them will read the books. It happens.
Actually, I thought the Prince Caspian film was disappointing and the Dawn Treader really let me down. The book, chapter by chapter, would have been a great screenplay (I would gladly have sat through a lo-o-ong movie that did this favorite book justice.) Why the green goo?
Notice how the Fearless Leader assumes that Americans are all morons who couldn’t be bothered with the important stuff that takes up his time (instead of getting to do “the fun stuff”) in Washington. That’s the script he’d like to read from.
The old idea seems to fit: catch ‘em while they’re young. My parents read aloud to us constantly when I was little, and my siblings and I grew up regarding books as ways to travel to exotic places and meet interesting people. During my college years, my teachers seemed baffled and insisted that I was some kind of mythological autodidactic creature that needed careful study.
School hyped up books as mystical organs of power, carrying Messages and Important Lessons. Mom and Dad read us stories about Norse gods, time-traveling aliens, and soldiers who outsmarted Death himself. Guess which approach worked . . .
I love your thoughts on this. It’s even better going to all those distant places when you read in a foreign language or two. You know, not everything gets translated into English.
The young ARE readers – and many of them writers. (Check out the NaNo sign up #’s sometime.) What they aren’t is ‘PC’ and ‘mainstream-publishing-our-message-is-good-for-you’ readers. Or – for that matter – very into killing trees. (Mom and Dad tend to find the corpses – and then there is screaming about “you read that trash” and things get… sad.)
Todays young readers are textual pirates – and proud of their rebel status. They may not read the ‘school’ list – or the ‘nanny state’ list. But they read! Check out ff.net.
Reading not only want’s to be free – it has been liberated. Just go on line and see.
My father was reading me Heinlein(not the raunchy ones though) by the time I was 5. Before that it was Hardy Boys and the Alfred Hitchcock books. Every night when I was little I would have something read to me. The moment I was able to read these things on my own, I was devouring books left and right.
This stopped roughly a month before the semester started and I had to do summer reading. The books chosen were incredibly dull compared to the masterpieces (at least to my young mind) I was going through on my own. Then there were the dreaded Accelerated Reader books. Science fiction and Fantasy are frowned upon by that program unless it is a great work of literature like “The Wizard of Oz” or “A Wrinkle in Time”. Now those are two excellent books, but when one is able to down 400 pages per week, that’s just not enough and the other accepted tales were dull.
There was a library in my hometown, an old house where the lady in charge had boxes of National Geographics, all nicely censored of naughty bits, and some books donated by churches around the town. A friend had a box of tom Swift books in the attic, and there were some books about WWII that veterans couldn’t seem to get enough of, though they were mostly off-limits to the likes of me. In short, not much in the way of books outside school.
I used to skip school some days and hitch-hike to the nearest city to go to the library there where I would take a book into the record room, put on head-phones, and listen to music, mostly anything with an album cover of a long-haired guy, one of whom I fell in love with, whose music I hid under the couch, that I returned for over and again till that day the librarian said, “I see you like that music. You know, Hayden wrote other music that you might like.”
Only ten percent of the kids who started school went on to graduate in my little town. We might think this is terrible, and it might be so if they went on to prison or to live in a commune in San Francisco. But the truth is that most went on to take jobs like telephone linemen, as an example. Maybe such people never read a book from one year to the next; but I am grateful for the work they do and the lives they live that make that work valuable to them.
I read three or four books a week, Paul Johnson wrecking my average, but I have no illusions that it makes me a better person. As Northrop Frye puts it, an education doesn’t make a bad man good, it makes him dangerous. I read, I write a bit. Just a few minutes ago I reread an old post that brings all this to mind: “The Range of the Cruel”, if I may. Reading is good, I think so, but I am eternally grateful to the men and women who hear the voice of a loved one in the line and who postpone their short vacations lest snow brings down the lines down south in the county.
Bless all the pipe-fitters and sales clerks and average folks few ever give much thought to, those who daily maintain our Modern world for the benefit of their families and, as it turns out, the likes of me too.
It never occurred to me that being a reader makes you a better person. It does, however, after a while give you enough of a background to evaluate the stories being pushed at you. …. Or it makes you more profoundly indoctrinated, depending on what you read, of course.
However I will trace the unwarranted-respect for authority figures and “specialists” (no, don’t tell me disrespect has grown. It has not. We worship “credentials”. Bad behavior has grown. That’s something else) to the decline in widespread reading skills that allowed people to read and understand easilly. Meaning, not struggle and not misread because they’re guessing whole-word style.
I was noting simply that for a stated goal of the schools “get kids to read” they’re doing the exact opposite of what they should be doing.
Literacy has specific purposes that are first and foremost about religion, i.e. the binding of a community of believers. Text itself becomes sacred. We still recoil from book-burners because we intuitively grasp the sense of this sacrality. The religious text, as delivered by, usually, obscurantist priest classes, is the manifest universal (for the bound) “reason for living/meaning of life.” The written religious text is for man, “justification of ways of God to man.” The sacred text is transcendent. It is no longer the work of one man’s mind and hand, it is the authoritative voice of God. It is definitely meant to make people better, more social, more moral, however the narrative defines or describes that. Books become universal in that they are for and about Everyman. The problem is who controls the access to such knowledge and who defines the sense of the narrative. The literate man can attempt to do so himself, leading the hierophants to condemn “bibliolotry.” Religion (and literacy) is nevertheless about being a better person, in spite of Marxist claims of conspiracy against the lower classes. Being in greater conformity to the communion is the good that comes from literacy. This might not actually be good, but the point is that it is the social good. It is a creation and maintenance of the Order. A conformist in a familist, tribalist, collectivist culture is good, and to submit to the authority of the higher authority as delivered by the hierophant is the greater good.
When the communion is lead by hierophants, all, including the hierophants, are bound (religio) to the Order. When individuals are literate, then we see a beginning of the end of collectivist morality. then, the individual is responsible for his own salvation, not part of the collective salvation/guilt that is the general religio. Wesley’s literacy campaigns began a destruction of the collectivist religio and replaced it with what Adam Smith in a different context calls “a harmony of interests.” Personal salvation is paramount to the individual, though he might well prefer living among the saved. This happens when men (women) are literate and can for themselves read the Bible. Literacy is about being a better person. But it is not actually about any such thing in the actual.
Postman argues that literacy is necessary for a disciplined and effective industrial work-force, and thus schools were created for the working class to train children to be punctual and focussed workers who could follow written instructions. This in its way is freedom. When people were still interested in creating in the work-force and work-place, and when further they were also interested in creating in the communion, then literacy was of great importance for effectiveness. Literacy allowed one to become a better person in the work-force and a better person in the community. Self-improvement, scorned by the upper-classes of reactionary manorialists and feudal nostalgics, was for the working classes a way of becoming what they valued as the good, i.e. becoming more moral and perhaps materially better off by improving their minds and manners.
The “gentleman,” steeped in piety and classics, has given way to the elitist of today steeped in pietism and Classic Comix. Literacy in this case is a disaster for the communion and for the community. Reading for its own sake is not a good course. Without a moral instruction behind it, literacy leads to, in the traitorous clericy, a decay of the binding into that opposite of religio, the fasces.
Better a seemingly semi-literate woman who thinks for herself than an indoctrinated fool from Harvard Law School.
A pity, really, as reading is the one and only pleasure that will stay with you lifelong, and through thick and thin.
There are barriers to be overcome in inculcating a love of reading in kids. Children are naturally more inclined toward social interaction than adults — it seems to take a while to develop a taste for solitude — and reading is a solitary activity. Alongside that, reading is sedentary, and a child’s desire to be moving around, using up energy, is hard to contain. All the same, the results can be worth the effort…if you have the perseverance and the sneakiness required to win!
(Does anyone remember Mom forbidding you to read after lights out…and reminding you where the flashlights are in case of a blackout?)
My dad would read us stories from “Jungle Book.” I am pretty sure that’s where – got my love of words and images and gentle humor. I can still hear Kipling’s rippling words in my dad’s voice, dearly beloved.
A few years later when I could read, the books I couldn’t get enough of were the “Wizard of Oz” series.
And there was song that I heard on the radio that I loved so much my mom ordered a 45 for me (I still have it) — “The White Albino Pink-Eyed Stallion,” sung by Rex Allen. Songwriter Marvin Rainwater used words unashamedly: “The White albino pink-eyed stallion, born to the devil in a lake of fire, bred with an introvert desire…”
Firstly children have to LEARN to read. In the UK the number of children who manage to navigate our formal education system – emerging barely able to read or write is deplorable. A check on the work of the Literacy Trust shows how much there is to be done. Adult Literacy Resources are to be found in every town and City.
As a child I was read to – every day. Bedtime stories became a doorway to knowledge and adventure, and spurred me to read for myself. My Mother taught me to read before I entered primary school. The first book I ever read was ” The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”. “Swallows and Amazons” followed and from then I was hooked. The titles date me. In those days there was no television. BUT youngsters today will read if presented with something that fires their imagination. Look at the success of Harry Potter. Every new title was preceded by hordes of children and teenagers queuing en masse outside bookshops which opened at midnight on the appointed day. How many homes do you know of where there isn’t a book in the house? Parents who have never read a damn thing except the sports pages in their daily paper / celebrity tittle tattle. Why? because no-one ever encouraged them. By the time they got to School they were presented with Texts that bored them to death, and put them off for life. It wasn’t until I was well into my thirties that I began to get to grips with Bill Shakespeare and his mates.
Many folk decry the emergence of Kindle. I don’t. Anything that gets people reading – young and old alike is to be welcomed with open arms.
I cannot get out of my mind a photo I saw some years ago of a young African child – aged around eight. Her face a mask of total concentration – crouched over a wooden board holding a piece of chalk. The school was nothing but a hut, and that small child had WALKED some ten miles to get there. She was learning to read. God Bless her dear heart.
Jez @ Chichester UK
Swallows and Amazons forever!!
Absolutely, and don’t forget “Treasure Island” and above all “The Wind in the Willows” – timeless.
I think Glenn Beck’s greatest achievement on TV, bar none, was actually getting people to read books. A lot of books. With his little blackboards he was able to convey to the American pulbic that reading was not only important, it could be fun, too. When he mentioned books on TV, their sales skyrocketed on Amazon.com. And when was the last time books on Washington or James Madison, let alone the Great Depression, were major best sellers? He was the only person on TV that didn’t talk down to people and actually treated them as if they had a brain. And guess what? People reacted to that and actually started reading again. Reading is something people still want to do. They only have to be reassured that it’s still worth their time. Believe me, it is.
Yes. Beck did the country a great service. He spoke passionately about the Constitution, our Founders, and our history. He was the beginning of America’s “Libertarian moment”. And yes, he got people reading, reading about things which truly matter.
He exposed so much rot in the administration, too. It was not just the exposing, but also, he set the precedent in going after it and mapped out how to do it. It would all have been meaningless without the foundations of civics he had established, the placing of the Constitution on a pedestal.
The foundations of the arguments of the Right so very often reference the Constitution. I do not remember it being this way before. I doubt such would have been very effective before this awakening by Beck.
The bottom line is reading and writing create freedom.
The invention of the printing press preceded overthrow of monarchies and spread of democracy in the world.
The Internet is doing the same, spreading idea’s and ideals to places that did not have access to information.
The world is a blank slate.
1959, Peggy Small, my 3rd grade teacher would read us Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books. A chapter, maybe two, at a time, after the Lords Prayer and the pledge. The rest of the story tracks like those above and I hope at the end of my life I can lay down the book ( or the Nook, or the BB ), tell my wife, a grandchild, a brother, a friend that I love them and die!!
Spider Robinson describes two brilliant ways to turn children into enthusiastic reader in a 1990 speech entitled “Seduction of the Ignorant”, which was published in one of his short story collections, Lifehouse. It really ought to be read in its entirety (it’s four paperback pages long) but here is the core:
I can offer two stratagems in this regard. The first was devised by my mother, and used upon me; the second my wife Jeanne and I developed and field-tested on our daughter, who turns sixteen in October of 1990.
My mother’s scheme was, I think, superior to my own, in that it required diabolical cleverness and fundamental dishonesty; it was however time- and labor-intensive. She would begin reading me a comic book — then, just as we had reached the point where the Lone Ranger was hanging by his fingertips from the cliff, buffalo stampede approaching, angry native peoples below … Mom would suddenly remember that she had to go sew the dishes, or vacuum the cat, or whatever — and leave me alone with the comic book.
I had to know how the story came out. There were pictures to assist me. Most of the words were ones I had just heard read aloud; I could go back and refer to them, again with visual aids. By the age of five, thanks to my mother’s policy of well-timed neglect, I had taught myself to read sufficiently well that one day she presented me with a library card and sent me to the library with instructions to bring home a book.
The librarian, God bless her, gave me a copy of Robert A. Heinlein’s novel for children, Rocket Ship Galileo … and from that day on there was never any serious danger that I would be forced to work for a living. Heinlein wrote stories so intrinsically interesting that it was worth the trouble to stop and look up the odd word I didn’t know. By age six I was tested as reading at college junior level.
The problem is that you cannot simply hand the child the comic book: you must read 80% of it to them, and stop reading with pinpoint timing. In this day and age, society has decided it can no longer afford the luxury of a full-time in-house child rearer in each family (opting instead to chase a chimera called “low-cost high-quality day care”), and with the best of intentions, you may not have that much time or energy to devote to the task of seducing your child.
In that case I recommend the system devised by my wife and myself. From the day our daughter was old enough to have a defined “bedtime,” we made it our firm policy that bedtime was bedtime, no excuses or exceptions … unless she were reading, in which case she could stay up as late as she pleased. The most precious gift any child can attain is a few minutes’ awareness past bedtime. She went for the bait like a hungry trout, and throughout her elementary school career was invariably chosen as The Narrator in school plays because of her fluency in reading.
Good for your mom, and good for you, too!
I remember, though, that my little children, who learned to read on their own before starting preschool (largely from being incessantly read to by me, and by my husband when he was home from work), also continued to enjoy being read to. We could read to them things that were at a more advanced reading level than they could handle on their own.
Then there’d be a new little milestone–as when my daughter discovered she could read the A. A. Milne Winnie-the-Pooh all by herself (not just the simpler Disney fare she also tolerated).
“You know that guy with the disheveled hair and the reddened eyes in your class?” Hum, if it was the 60s and 70s, the only guys and gals with red eyes in class was not because of reading mind altering substances. Those were the days. I could smoke in class; college was just high school with ashtrays.
Someone from yur collige may break one of yur neecaps if ya say th’ name of it…..in print….here…….but, I double-dare ya anyways.
Schools force kids to read long boring books over summer vacation. My 13 year old niece has to read Moby Dick and A tail of Two Cities. Worthy books but not exactly fun summer reading for an adolescent girl. Reading is now a chore for her. She doesn’t have time for a book she might enjoy over the summer. She likes to read. Think of the kids who don’t
A Tale of Two Cities.
So what you are saying is that instead of summer reading being the best of times, it’s the worst of times?
Actually these books have great tensions, and I would suggest she stretch her horizons, but if not her style, tell your kid to do what I did; read the books she wants, and finagle the rest the best she can. Not really kosher, but better to read other books, than not to read at all
The worst of times for spelling maybe.
Interesting approach. I will link to this from my Old Jarhead blog. I was discouraged from reading comic books. Also my dad used to give me hell about being in my room reading a book, when I could be spending time with the family—watching TV! Go figure. I still average about a book a week, and pile them up faster than I can read them.
Robert A. Hall
Author: The Coming Collapse of the American Republic
(All royalties go to a charity to help wounded veterans)
Love seeing I’m not alone. My first sentence (they tell me) was “Gig (read) a BOOK!” in a decided imperative. Not addicted; I really can do without reading if necessary, but the norm is at least one a day–and my parents made it sound as if I were doing drugs or something (Is she reading AGAIN??!!) Dickens, Solzhenitzen (sp?) and Gabaldon may take two–dontcha love books that don’t end too quickly? Love the ideas presented here to foster reading; as a teacher my ♥ shattered at the number of students who, when asked to name their favorite book would reply “Oh, I DON’T READ.”
Just returned from a visit to my mother’s house and revisited where my contraband was hidden. The chapter books were still there on the shelf, right with the non-PC picture books with gruesome images that now delight the grandchildren. I plan to spirit them out when we move to more permanent housing.
My brother’s leafy stash was found much earlier, but, after all, he became a doctor, so all is forgiven.
My mother tells me I wouldn’t tear up magazines like a normal baby. I’d sit on the floor and turn the pages. I got a library card at age 4, read at college level by the 3rd grade and to this day, I’d rather read than do almost anything else. I usually read about 200 books a year.
I don’t buy the general premise. What schools and even parents do is less important than genetics. The writer is overwhelmingly likely to have read as much as he did regardless of what adults said to him about it. This gets obscured because most people looking at the question consider it from their own situation and their children’s. They attribute their reading to what their parents said and did and their children’s reading to what they themsleves do and say. I did it too. I was a literature major, my wife a librarian, and we attributed our sons’ reading intensity to the pro-book environment we provided (No TV, few films, lots of reading to them, modeling reading, pretending not to notice the bedtime of reading children…).
Adoption and twin studies suggest otherwise. All our frenetic activity explains only ten, maybe twenty percent of the variance.
So, then, Readers should be Breeders?
I have to disagree. I find that everyone loves to read, but what they like to read is different. There are those who read all they can get their hands on. Others are far more selective. If someone does not help them identify what really piques their interest, they become disinclined to read. Once they start reading some things, and start branching out, then there is no stopping them.
Those who never pick up a book have been taught to NOT read. They have been dumbed down. They have truly been rendered stupid. They were not naturally stupid. They were made that way. Human beings are actually smarter than we are allowed to be.
Before the Printing press made reading widespread, people used to have to memorize stuff, and they did it in one pass. Clerks functioned as adding machines and were just as fast. Even in the Old West, men who could not read could be given directions to someplace hundreds of miles away, and they did not have to be told twice, nor did they have to “write it down”. Now we can hardly get 6 blocks.
Another problem is the misuse of words, the lack of clear understanding of the specific meaning of words. A person’s IQ will rise about 40 points just by using a dictionary all the time to look up words he thinks he knows already. Muddled understanding of words leads to muddy thinking. We are all supposed to be geniuses, else we could not have survived and prospered so well. We have it in us. We have just allowed ourselves to atrophy as a species.
Whites tend to be average, 100 IQ. Arabs and American Blacks tend to be about 85 IQ. Orientals tend to be above 100, and Jews tend to be about 115 average, the smartest of the races. These variances are because of cultures, not genetics. Arabs are held back by Islam. American Blacks are held back by their subculture. Blacks elsewhere tend to fall into the normal range, except where Islam is predominant. Orientals (except in Muslim countries) and Jews emphasize education, which allows folks to reach some of their potential.
Mostly, though, it is about word and concept comprehension. It cuts through all the cultural influences and renders one smart. People who do not like to read usually have poor comprehension of words.
People who cling to false political dogma also have a misunderstanding of words. This is why I often suggest using certain words in certain ways, and why I deconstruct arguments by saying, “I don’t think that word means what you think it means.” Words matter.
Sorry for being so… wordy.
Well, my poor child was humming along reading our list of required books for the summer. He just tripped across the required reading book, and got our comments. Poor kid- he wants an A, but he has to read this awful, doctrinaire book ( seriously, it was written to bring on racial harmony in the world, in 1969) with a repellent narrator and a bizarre story arc.
of course he’s going to hate reading.
I’m thinking that if you encourage your child to articulate what he doesn’t like about the doctrinaire book, you’re doing him a favor–giving him permission to see that “the powers that be” (at school, in this case) are trying to manipulate his feelings; letting him know that it’s better to choose one’s attitude, rather than to be chivvied into it by propaganda. Maybe you can use this as a springboard for helping him to see how often (television advertising, political commercials) someone is trying to pressure or guilt-trip him into a particular line of thinking or acting.
Several people here have hit it on the head: start with fun reading, comic books, Reader’s Digest, books about cavemen, submarines, wars (I am remembering my own), Paddle To The Sea, The Early Cave Men, Jungle Books….and they will move up the chain.
We can still tap into old music, but a lot of the old books are just gone.
Today, the books are lectures in disguise, and the kids don’t read them.
Teachers too, want perfectly spelled and formatted book reports of a totally accceptable and “worthy” book, not excited reports of what a student read for fun. So they get regurgitated Sparks Notes reports. Teachers have made reading tedious, boring and a chore. You may as well feed a 9 year old caviar and sprouts.
When my 12 year old daughter lagged a bit in reading, i got her the “Clique” books. Derided by snobs, she read them all and was impatient for new ones to hit the stacks. Anything to have her read. And oddly enough, there are more of these fun books for girls than boys. It worked: she read.
Public libraries today are stuffed with crap that may have been intended as fun but I am not sure it is. Biographies of Cher, Madonna…but fewer and fewer adventure books for kids. Where are the adventure books I read as a boy? Gone-tossed out. Too old. Too much lead in the illustrations. Too violent. Too…fun. Not enough redemption in the book.
In their place? Mediocre tomes approved by some library committee. Like having grandmother approve your prom date or select music for a teen age dance. Most of them don’t even know about the older books or despise thems ince they were written before the 1960′s.
Meanwhile, Kipling’s White Seal and Rikki Tiki Tavi are banished–no dead white men books allowed. World War II stories? Gone. Sad.