One of the things Janine and I are very happy about is our daughters love to read. It is a treat to go to the library. Baby Bop is picking up on this trend and will bring books to us, so we will read to him.
We've noticed several years a sad thing. Most of the friends of our daughters who go to public schools do not enjoy reading. They don't read for pleasure.
This article from across the Atlantic reports on a similar problem in the UK - School literacy lessons 'have left a generation lacking the stamina to read books':
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School literacy lessons have killed off the study of English and left a generation lacking the stamina to read whole books, a teachers' leader claimed yesterday.
Dr Mary Bousted said the Government's £500million literacy drive forced children to study short extracts from works of literature instead of the full text.
Youngsters were losing the art of reading for pleasure as a result, the general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers warned.
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It is an interesting phrase: "lacking the stamina to read whole books." My impression had been that our daughters' friends didn't read because reading had been turned into a chore, something boring. The claim from the UK is that children no longer have the strength of character or will power to read. They have the ability, but the students are too lazy.
(Hat tip: EducationNews.org)
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Technorati tags: government schools, public school, public education, education, reading
3 comments:
I would agree that the more teachers turn reading into a chore, instead of something enjoyable, the less kids will love to read. One problem with using short extracts (or 'gobbets,' as my favorite professor called them) from longer books for classroom work is that you don't get to enjoy the book. It's not that much fun to read a short piece from the middle of a longer story.
In American schools, it's very common to use some program like Accelerated Reader, where there's a list of acceptable books for a kid to read, graded according to reading level, and then a quiz for each book to evaluate comprehension. What a wonderful way to kill a love of reading!
"Here, kid, choose a book from this list. No, you can't have that book, it's not on the list. I don't care if that book looks neat, you don't have time to read it. Sorry, that book is already checked out, you can't have it either. Now, read this book, and when you're done I'll give you a pointless test that asks you random and often unimportant questions about the book you read. See, isn't reading fun?"
Another good way to kill reading is to always test the kid on every book, or ask questions, etc. If a kid never gets to just read a book of his own choice, just for fun and nothing else, how can he possibly learn to love reading?
I have noticed this difference between my girls and the public schooled kids, too. In fact, parents have made comments to me - shocked, I tell you, shocked to see my girls reading in a spare moment. I come from a family of readers - I never thought it unusual that someone would be reading a book, but apparently it is these days!
I almost fell into the hate-reading trap too after many years of traipsing home from the public library with a stack of books up to my chin. It only took 1 book, Silas Marner, in an accelerated English course. If I didn't like a book I stopped reading it, after all, there were plenty more in the stacks. Well, that didn't fly in this class so I got drummed out after 3 weeks. I was upset, since most of the kids in the class didn't read for fun, they only read to get good grades to get into fancy colleges.
20 years later I'm still leaving the library each week with my tote bags full and the big kids lugging their own tote bags. I learned that a life-long love for reading is more important than most things, including a fancy degree.
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