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It seems like most people don't read for fun in this country. If one was to ask the average person on the street how many books they read a year, the answer would probably be pretty low.
My theory is that the education system is to blame. Sure, video games, tv, movies, etc all are recreational activities that require potential reading time, but why are they chosen over reading?
Bad precedent.
Schools make children hate books and reading early on by forcing it on them. Schools make kids to boring book reports, read a set amount of pages per day, that stuff takes all the fun out of it.
Switch out dusty old books our grandparents read for modern ones. Kids would be dying to read Angels and Demons to find out what happens next vs War and Peace.
The fact that there are plenty of people who like to read makes it impossible to put a blanket blame on schools.
The reality is that primary and secondary education falls on parents more than it does on schools. Anyone who disagrees with this is ignorant and educated. There are countless empirical studies that show the value of parent's involvement in education and the fact that they have majority of the impact on one's desire to learn.
Everything from the learning environment at home to choosing which schools your children go to comes into play.
This doesn't mean that poor quality schools don't exist. They most certainly do. But there are also plentiful good quality schools that empower students to learn on their own and make it a desirable process. In the end, it's the parent's choice where their children go to school.
I teach at a community college. Many of my students are highly resistant to reading anything. They have to do a book review assignment that requires them to read an actual paper book. They have about 100 titles to choose from on a list I give them related to the discipline that offers selections related to pretty much every subject matter the class touches on. They can also find one on their own subject to approval.
They act as if I'm making them walk to the gates of Mordor. So no, it's not the selection because they can choose whatever is most interesting to them. If they can't find anything interesting, they should not have taken the class.
Sometimes I'll have them read short articles in class and it's fascinating to watch to them read. They'll read every word, one by one, as if they're reading it aloud, causing it to take 2-3X longer than it should. It seems to me that most people never learn to read beyond an 8th grade level or so. They learn the basics of reading and never progress beyond that. They can read the words from the page, but they get little else from it. That's why things like "Tale of Two Cities" must be so painful.
I think elementary schools are doing okay. Middle and high schools are messing up. It's somewhere between grades 7-10 we lose them.
I know adults that don't read books, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they don't read. My husband reads one or two newspapers a day and lots and lots of technical stuff. Once in a while he'll read a non-fiction book. His sisters and brothers on the other hand, are avid readers. I don't think that schools are to blame when someone does not choose to read books for pleasure.
We've had this conversation on this forum before. I don't really blame the schools for people reading less books. In fact all the elementary and middle schools that I know of put a huge emphasis on reading for comprehension and pleasure. The elementary schools have a drop and read time every day. Middle Schools have competitions to see who can read the most pages. The summer reading books for the younger kids and reluctant older readers are a mix of classic and new books.
What I've found is that there are just too many other interests that trump slow moving reading. Someone posted a TED talks about the effect of television on children. Too much screen time - computers/tv/video games, etc at a young age changes kids brains so they cannot concentrate long on anything. A slow developing story line is painful for someone used to watching and interacting with action adventures.
Reading, like anything you want to get good at requires practice. Kids don't practice. It's too easy to just watch the movie or google the Clif notes. If you don't practice reading, you will read slow and reading will not be fun. If it's not fun, you won't read for fun. The movie is much more fun and there's popcorn.
Don't blame the schools because people don't practice reading to get better at reading. Schools can't make them read enough to get better at reading. Now parents can do something here. My mom used to dump us at the library for the entire day a couple of times a month. I read 1-2 books a month as a child outside of school. With the exception of the two youngest who were 12 and 8 when mom died, we're all avid readers (when we have time. I have quite a library but haven't had much time for reading since I became a teacher other than reading things I needed to.).
School is where I learned to read but there came a point where I had to start practicing the skill to get better at it. Blaming the schools is like blaming the music teacher because the student doesn't practice his instrument at home. Schools cannot monitor every moment of student's lives. We can't stop them from using things like Clif notes or watching the movie instead of reading the book. The reason kids don't read well is they are lazy (they'll tell you they're just using their resources). If you think that as a high school teacher I can do something to fix this, tell me what you think I can do. I assign reading but that doesn't mean they do the reading. If they don't do the reading they don't get better at reading.
Last edited by Ivorytickler; 07-20-2014 at 07:17 AM..
If anything, my kids' schools emphasize leisure reading considerably more than I when I was in school. I don't think we can "blame" any one aspect for why some people don't like to read. Perhaps because there are just so many other activities competing for their attention? Kids do have less unstructured free time today, so perhaps they just don't have as much free time to read and it doesn't become part of their daily routine.
Personally, my kids love to read. I never forced it on them, and half the time we forget to fill in their reading logs for school, but they read every day. The only thing I really did to encourage them was, from the time they were little toddlers, I've always left some books by their bed to look at while they are falling asleep. It's not that reading isn't important to me, but rather that I love reading so much, I wouldn't even know how to go about teaching someone else to learn to love reading; nothing caused me to love it, I just always have. My husband on the other hand, HATES reading and will only willing read the Bible or car magazines. He finds reading to be boring and a waste of time.
I assume this just generally means fiction/novels, because I LOVE looking up science articles on the internet although I don't quite read fiction books.
I generally agree with the comments in this thread, but for me, what always turned me off (I'm 25 BTW), was that schools really love to over analyze certain books. I had to take a fiction course in college for Gen Ed and we spent the entire class (90 minutes) dissecting one little paragraph. And the way the class was designed, you were forced to participate. To me it just took all the fun out of reading a book at face value. I'm not the most insightful guy when it comes to discussing novels, but I can find enjoyment out of some books in general.
I guess looking back to high school and middle school, some of the material they gave us just sucked. If I can't find any interest in characters (for example, if I can't relate or sympathize) or setting, it's going to be hard for me to enjoy subsequent books. I get a little more cynical in the long run and start writing off other potential books. That said, some readings were awesome, such as anything mythology related (Odyssey) and even a few (I said few) Shakespeare works.
I think at 25, I still grew up in a time where I had to imagine things myself through any form of entertainment (books, video games, etc), but now video games are evolving tremendously so younger kids don't have to do the "work" of imaging things for themselves.
I think the AR program may be doing some harm.
It's a great idea but having to reach a number of points per week/semester makes reading forced.
And then there's a test after every book that they don't always pass.
And the bar is set pretty low to accommodate the slower/lower readers and kids read books below their level to get through them quicker to get the points.
I think the AR program may be doing some harm.
It's a great idea but having to reach a number of points per week/semester makes reading forced.
And then there's a test after every book that they don't always pass.
And the bar is set pretty low to accommodate the slower/lower readers and kids read books below their level to get through them quicker to get the points.
Wouldn't that take the joy out of reading ?
The best program I've seen, but this is at the elementary level was called "Stop, drop and read". Several times a week, an alarm would go off and everyone (including the staff) was expected to stop what they were doing and read for 15-20 minutes. I understand it was dead silent in the school during reading time.
I don't know what to do at the high school level. Once kids learn to google answers, they don't read.
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