ladyofastolat | On reading for pleasure

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On reading for pleasure

This is a predictable rant, because I know I've ranted about similar things before. In fact, I can probably leave half the words blank, and you'd all be able to fill them in. (Now, there's an idea for an LJ post…)

Anyway, someone at work has just given me "100 books every child should read", from this Saturday's Telegraph. It starts with an article by Michael Morpurgo about how schools should promote the sheer pleasure of books and stories.. I agree with every word he says. A terrifying number – Half? Thee quarters? I forget the exact number – of primary school teachers never read a story aloud to their children just for the fun of it. Philip Pullman read through the entire primary school Literacy Strategy and didn't find the word "enjoy" in there once. Novels are reduced to out-of-context extracts, and children are then invited to analyse the use of adjectives. Most school libraries I've seen are dire, full of tatty thirty-year-old books. Some secondary schools no longer have libraries at all "because it's all on the internet now, isn't it?" Scared by the National Curriculum, SATs and league tables, many teachers feel they can't justify spending ten minutes at the end of a day just reading for the fun of it.

So far so good, then. However, after his article, without a word of caution or introduction, we get "100 books every child should read." And what a list it is! Barely a dozen of the books were written within the last 25 years. Few are likely to appeal to reluctant readers. Apparently "early teens", for example, "should" be reading Great Expectations – a book that I'm Dickens never intended as "a children's book."

This list appears to be preaching the opposite message from Michael Morpurgo. "Push the joy of reading" doesn't match with "should". A lot of children never discover the joy of reading because their parents don't read, never encourage them to read, and never introduce them to books. Others, however, never discover the joy of reading because their parents push them too much. Over-ambitious parents can be the death of a child's interest in reading. We've all seen them in libraries: the parent who crossly snatches the child's chosen book out of their hand on the grounds that it's "too easy" or because they've "read it before", gets them a book that's clearly far too hard for the child, and then (presumably) boasts to the other parents, "Of course, she's reading books written for 9 year olds now."

Research has shown* that the children who love reading tend to do better at school. Research has shown that the best way to get a child to love reading is to let them choose their own books. Add that element of "should" and many of them lose interest. Some of them will want to relax at times with a "too easy" book. Some will want to reread an old favourite for the tenth time. Some will spend a year reading a single formulaic series, and loving it. Some will only ever read non-fiction.

This should be encouraged! By all means, try to gently introduce them to new experiences – to "better books", if you like. This is great! I have nothing at all against classics, and loved them as a child. (However, when I try to look objectively at some of them, I do wonder quite why they gained their classic status. I suspect a case of the emperor's new clothes in a few of them.) Read these aloud and enthuse over them, and perhaps the child will come to love them, too; enthusiasm is infectious, after all. But perhaps they won't. Times change. Children change. Interests change. Fashions change. Perhaps that worthy classic will leave them cold, while that "formulaic trash" inspires them and leads them to play rich games of the imagination, and to write stories of their own. It won't last, and they'll move on in time to something else - perhaps to that very classic they scorned six months earlier.

However, tear that "trash" out of their hand and tell that they will have to read this "good" book, whether they like it or not… What message are you giving about the joy of reading then? Reading is a chore. Reading is a test. Reading is something you have to do, not something you do because you enjoy it. "I am not a reader," they will come to think, and soon that prediction will come true. *

By all means, have book lists that suggest books that children might enjoy. Gently lead them to new discoveries. Recommend. Enthuse. But put a list of "100 books that a child should read" into the hands of over-ambitious parents, and I tremble at the result.

* I have read specific research on these issues, so these aren't empty statements. I'm just not citing the details here since this is an LJ rant, not an article.

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Not all of us did history GCE/GCSE, unfortunately; and I do think that there is a greater bias against understanding in the prevailing educational climate. Admittedly anecdotal opinion in Oxford and elsewhere is finding each successive year of undergraduates less well-armed for study than the year before, both in knowing the questions to ask and having the cultural background that history courses presuppose (though the latter may simply be cultural change and value neutral).

I do think that there is a cycle of expectation-lowering in the public sector; but while I agree with you that understanding someone else's learning experience and learning from it yourself is probably absorbed osmotically, if teaching (whether from the state or not) doesn't try to encourage it, even on the most unpromising ground, then what can it do?

Then let's blame pop-postmodernism and the prevalent belief that as everything is a construction it doesn't matter whether the reporter reconstructs it or not, as truth is subjective... but it appears to me that a large proportion of the population don't know to question what they read or see; one of the great experiences which I took away from the post-1485 Arthuriana conference I attended in 2004 was talking to the media studies lecturers there, for whom teaching classes of people who have just scraped into higher education about how the adverts they saw on television last night work to persuade, or discussing the success of the Harry Potter books (or less celebrated bestsellers), is to give people a last chance at seeing beyond the surface; often, they think, with results, but then they would say that.

I agree that this is a problem, but I'm not sure that it's down to a specific lack in education specifically, in this particular case.

We use computers but cannot program or build them: we cannot build or maintain our cars or houses, we don't know where our food comes from or how to work our mobile phones. We listen to music but cannot play or sing. If something goes wrong, our first instinct is to blame someone else. What hope therefore that most people will be able to build or analyse a sentence, or take responsibility for their own misunderstanding of a text?

Incompetence at all levels and on all subjects is expected, and delivered.

True. I grew up resistant to learning anything that I didn't want to do with the result that I am ignorant about all those things you describe; and my sentence building has been criticised by one expert in that field too.

My memory is that this sort of thing was also covered fairly extensively in Eng. Lit GCE, but I've never taught that and my experience of it is long ago. Anyway, I spent most of my Eng Lit classes reading non-official books under the desk so maybe I'm wrong.

I just feel that although I had a reasonably good education that covered this area, it left me hopelessly naive about communications via 'official' channels. I learned about those from experience, not lessons. It may be that other people are better at absorbing concepts that they are being deliberately taught than I am, of course. I'm crap at that. Let me try it and break it, that's how I learn!

I agree with every word you said.

When I was doing my student teaching, I set aside of portion of every single schoolday to read to my kids. There were no questions afterward, no analysis, no tests. It was reading for the pure pleasure of it. I read Charlotte's Web to my second grade kids, and I was not the only one crying at the end.

I learned to read at age 3 because my mother read to me all the time. And I would insist on "reading" the books back to her. She thought - correctly at first, no doubt - that I was merely parroting the words I had heard a hundred times from her. She knew it was the real deal when I read a brand-new book to her without ever having heard it before.

When I was a kid, we went to the library every single Saturday. It was a tradition. If I found a book stamped with a red A for Adult, I gave it to my mom and she checked it out for me, no questions asked. If she saw I was checking out Black Beauty for the thousandth time, she would say, "You've already read that!" and I would say, "So? I like it!" and that would be the end of the conversation. I can remember evening after evening, watching both my parents sitting in the living room, the television off, both of them quietly reading a book.

For as long as I can remember I've loved to read. And I give all the credit for that to my parents.

The thing is, parents genuinely want to do the best for their children. They're assailed from all sides by "experts" telling them that if they do such and such, their child will succeed, and that if they fail to do it, they're betraying their child's chances. There's a lot of insecurity around. If some "expert" says "DO THIS!" at least some parents hear that as "If I don't do this, I'm a bad mother!"

It's easy to say they're stupid, but there's a lot of emotion and insecurity and good intentions involved. For example, a study recently showed that expensive "educational" toys ("turn your toddler into a genius!") are actually counter-productive, since what toddlers need is lots of talking and listening and inter-action. You can say "Oh, but the parents who believe that hype deserve anything they get." I prefer to accept that it's human nature for quite a lot of people to believe what "experts" say, and therefore to make sure that said "experts" aren't misquoted, misrepresented by the media, or made up in the service of advertising campaigns

There's something odd happening. Reading the primary school history curriculum, I can see lots of emphasis on "how do we find out?", and questioning the accuracy of sources. However, children don't seem to be able to take what they learn in one lesson and apply it elsewhere. It's strange. In "Literacy" they can tell you what an index in. Put them in a library and ask them how they discover if this book includes something on lions, they go totally blank. In "Literacy" they also learn persuasive writing - how to write it, and how to recognise it. They seem to learn it well enough to pass a test on it... but fail to apply it in the wider world.

Plus, they have this scary belief that "if it's on the Internet, it's true." Even more scary, many of their parents and grandparents seem to hold this view even more strongly.

Hear! Hear! I haven't read all the comments yet but I know so many people who have been put off reading by what they had to do at school (when it was something like read Gerald Durrell and write a few essys & character studies), so I shudder at the thought of what hoops kids today have to jump through - from too early an age too by the sound of it.

When The Big Read came out Na'Lon and I tried to read various books that neither of us had read before which were on there, some were good, some were good but 'work' (To Kill a MOckingbird), some were okay but short (The Alchemist) and some were pure shite but highly reccommended by the LitCrit crowd, in this case Fowles' "The Magus" which I stopped reading a third of the way in and am not at all interested in finishing except for the reading equivalent of the hair-shirt medal. And frankly I'd rather watch paint dry as I'm sure that will only seem to last ages.

That sounds ideal! And the way they made you study Othello... Agh! What on earth were they thinking? And then they wonder why so many young people think these things are boring...!

The "reading only extracts" thing is a product of the Literacy Hour, introduced by the government ten years ago in an attempt to improve literacy standards. It's worked in that children are getting better at passing tests. It's not worked in that they're visibly worse (visibly to us librarians, that is) at actually reading books, and the number of children who say they enjoy reading has fallen over those ten years. The Literary Hour is very structured. The introduction of the Literacy Hour (coupled, I should add, with health and safety rules) caused a massive drop in the number of schools taking their children to the local library. "We're do busy doing literacy to let them read", was effectively what they day.

That's great! One of the best ways to get children to want to read is to be seen reading yourself - to be seen lost in a book, weeping over it, laughing. I saw a survey recently that asked teachers if they read themselves. Most said yes, but quite a few said they didn't - they were far too busy to read.

At least with adults, they've already made up their mind about whether they like reading or not. They can try books in a list like this, realise they don't like an individual one, and move on. It's more dangerous with children because they're just beginning to form their attitudes and can be put off for life by one bad experience - especially if coupled with a well-meaning parent or teacher forcing them to keep reading it to the end, thinking this is for the best.

Don't get me started on the vast overuse and overemphasis on standardized tests. They kill education dead. I've known teachers who quit because as they said they were spending so much time testing the kids and preparing them for the tests that they didn't have any time to actually teach them anything. Grr. Arrgh.

What I meant by that was that I wish you had been around when I was in junior school. I had a succession of teachers, plus my grandfather (a retired junior school deputy headmaster), who argued that because I was clever I should be reading 'classics'. But I had absolutely no interest in that sort of thing then (and to be honest, very little now). Most of what I read at that age was non-fiction (somehow that didn't count) and the only fiction I read was Doctor Who novels.

To be fair to them, my parents never thought this, and never made me read anything I didn't want to. Actually come to think of it, they never stopped me from watching anything on television, or limited the time I could spend playing computer games, or made me play a musical interest or take up a particular hobby. I wouldn't describe my parents as 'liberal', but when I hear other people say how they weren't allowed to watch more than an hour's telly a day or made to learn to play the oboe (or whatever), I think that they must have been more laissez-faire than most middle class parents.

One thing they did do was read along with me when I was very little, just like evilmissbecky described. Regardless of all the crackpot ideas that you hear of parents being told to make their children clever (play them music while they're in the womb, breast-feed until they're twelve years old, pay for extra tuition when they're three etc), I imagine the best thing parents can do for their children is just that - sit down and read with them.

I don't remember my mother ever reading a book (she did read Woman and Woman's Weekly, though), but my father read all the time and we always had books in the house. My (10 year older) brother read science fiction, and by the time I was 12 I had read every book in the house, including father's Dickens (didn't enjoy it much), Gone With The Wind (not sure I actually understood it!) and ... yes, all the science fiction! I had read the entire junior library long before I was old enough to be allowed into the adult library - I always thought that was a stupid rule, not allowing a child to take out an adult book even if accompanied by an adult who'd checked it was OK! I guess I was just the sort of child who'd read the label on a jar if nothing else was available ... but had I been *told* what to read, I suspect I would have been a lot less happy.

I was slow starting. I've always tended to laziness, and I guess reading seemed too much like hard work. I have a wonderfully clear memory of my father standing in my bedroom door saying he couldn't understand why I didn't want to read, because all the knowledge in the world was just out there waiting for me ... I must have taken him at his word, since my memory is that from that moment on my and books became inseparable!

What I've found down the years is that people who grow up in houses with books seem more likely to end up with a love of books - but that's not scientific, just observed.

Internet replace books? Nope, it just doesn't have that delicious *smell* that paper acquires with age!

I was extremely lucky with something that happened when I was in 2nd year middle school - I realised at the time that I was very lucky, but now I appreciate it even more, and how very unlucky most of the other children were. My school (or, more probably the LEA) introduced a new reading scheme. It had, as far as I recall, stages from 1-12, where 12 represented the age-level they felt you should have reached by the time you were 12, i.e. end of middle school. (Level 1 was for very, very beginning readers.) Well, the flaw in this plan is obvious, right? And blessedly, they started the scheme with what seemed like rather a decent assessment of your 'reading level'. I believe I was assessed at level 20. What this meant for me in practice was that I and another girl were given absolutely free rein of our entire (rather good at the time) school library, no supervision, no checks, to choose what we wanted, and got to spend several lessons a week for the next three years *just reading* lovely, lovely books, while our poor comperes were working through the 'readers' and doing the questions and exercises at the end of every section (I assume in the later years there must have been more children who had reached the end of the 'readers' and joined us in library privileges). To be fair I can't really say how good/bad the readers were - they seemed to consist of short stories or extracts or versions, often cut-down or paraphrased, of a fairly wide variety of things - but I do know that for me at least they were seriously lacking in appeal compared with the option of just choosing what I wanted to read and then reading straight through it to the end (or possibly not; though I don't recall not finishing any books, I also don't recall that not being allowed - and really, they wouldn't have known!) I *think* I was asked to write up a paragraph or two about each book I read, sort of like a book report, I guess, but I don't recall that being a hardship; indeed I scarcely remember that aspect of the deal. As I say, gloriously lucky to be given school time to do what I considered a leisure activity ;-)

You are right: I don't really expect everyone to be their own experts in every possible field: nobody knows everything.

However, I do think that it is reasonable to expect adults to be a bit cautious about newspaper content, which is pretty well known to be produced as quickly as possible with the sole intent of selling more papers. That's not 'expert' content, it's just some random journalist's opinion.

I remember that same scenario from that short period I spent teaching history GCSE! They didnt' transfer skills and knowledge from one context to another. Drove me mad... (natural teacher? NOT!).

I am pretty sure that I did this too - I can remember thinking at about 14 or so, that one of the nice things about DWJ books is that sometimes you get that moment when you the reader can see what's going on, but the character can't and then all the facts the character already had sort of slide round and make a whole new fact for them. She usually words it as 'and he saw that...'

I wonder if the modular structure and packed curriculum now makes it more difficult to relate all the chunks of info and synthesize them into a transferable form?

I'm not sure I agree with that. Someone who decides they don't enjoy reading at the age of 6, but who is technically literate, can surely change their mind at the age of 40 and discover a new world?

Likewise, surely there must be people who enjoyed reading as a child, but when they grew up, put it aside as a childish activity for which there is no space in their new adult life?

Surely putting people off reading is a bad thing at any age?

We've just been interviewing for a Saturday position, and of course we ask "So you want to work in a bookshop - what do you like to read?" Three applicants seeking their first job after GCSEs said "Great Expectations" and one said "The Return of the Native". Go figure...

We also interviewed a girl, the same age, for a Sunday position who had not only read Rebecca but had also then moved on to Jamaica Inn, and gave such a good precis of it that I wanted to read it myself. She starts next week.

I imagine the best thing parents can do for their children is just that - sit down and read with them.

Yup. And talk to them. And listen to them. Pre-school teachers and reception teachers are reporting that more and more children are coming to them without pretty basic language skills - speaking and listening. There's a national campaign called "Talk to your baby"; The sad thing is that it's actually necessary.

No idea! It was certainly fairly segregated when I was at school - after 11, anyway. History was history, and geography was geography, and English was English etc. Different classrooms, different teachers, different colours of exercise book. And my Mum often used to claim - and probably still does - that she couldn't do something "because it was maths", before my Dad pointed out that she not only could do, but did it daily - e.g. in the context of working out cooking times. ("But that's not maths!" she'd say. "It's cooking!")

They're controversial here at the moment. When I was at school, the only testing we had (before 16) was internal tests to help the school assess our progress. Now there are national tests at 7, 11 and 14. The results (school averages, not individual pupils) are published in high profile League Tables, so schools whose pupils do badly are named and shamed. Needless to say, every school wants to do well, so everything is sacrificed to the altar of the test. The majority of teachers (as far as I understand) are opposed to them, especially at 7. But what do they know? They're only teachers. The Government knows best, of course. (*waves irony flag*)

I don't remember learning to read. My parents have told me that they suggested occasionally that I might want to start making sense of these word things, and did some gentle attempts to make me think that way, but I showed no interest. Then, when I was just about to start school, I suddenly panicked, thought I'd be expected to read fluently before I started, and announced "I'm going to learn to read now"... and did, pretty much instantly. Had my parents pushed me more, though, I wonder what the result would have been.

I find it very depressing how many households supposedly contain no books at all. And then you have that stupid estate agent thing, when they tell you to get rid of your books if you want your house to sell...!

I really don't remember any school reading scheme after infant school. However, a few fragments of memory support the belief that my teachers just let me get on and read what I liked. I do have a few memories of everyone else being given some comprehension leaflet, and the teacher passing me by on the grounds that there was no need. I remember doing a lot of reading in class, too, so perhaps my experience was the same as yours.

I do remember "reading age" tests - just reading lists of words. I remember, aged 7, stumbling on the last word ("idiosyncrasy") and being very cross with myself. I went home, looked it up, asked my parents how to pronounce it and what it meant, remembered it all year, and proudly got it right the following year.

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On reading for pleasure

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Reading

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Re: Reading

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