On reading for pleasure
Jan. 22nd, 2008 12:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ladyofastolatThis 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.
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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no subject
Date: 2008-01-22 12:56 pm (UTC)Also, that, at eleven, we read Ivanhoe in class, but the teacher picked out all the descriptive bits (including, believe it or not, the "range of bars above the glowing charcoal" sequence where Isaac is being threatened with torture) and not things like the tournament to study. The result was that I was completely put off Scott until I picked up Ivanhoe again at fourteen (my parents had bought me a nice edition when I said I was doing it at school - they were very proud of the fact that I had passed the eleven plus and was going to the grammar school of my choice) which was exactly the right age for me, and found that, guess what, I enjoyed reading Scott after all!
My parents didn't have money to buy many books, so I read what I wanted to read from the library (boy's adventure stories and pony books and science fiction - not fantasy at all until I was about 12) and I used my pocket money to buy American comic books and Armada and Puffin paperbacks - but I had junior school teachers who certainly did read to us. Though it is now more than fifty years ago, I can still remember one teacher reading Ernest Thompson Seaton to us - which fed my passion for natural history as well as fiction.
Bah! to current educational thinking if it loses this joy for children.
And Bah! to dunderheads who can't remember what they enjoyed reading as a child.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-22 01:25 pm (UTC)I devoured Walter Scott between the ages of 11 and 15 or so. I'm fairly sure I must have "done" the tournament scene at school, since I clearly remember reading that scene before I knew who the characters were, but all his other books I found voluntarily.
I do remember my parents gently suggesting that I probably shouldn't be wasting my birthday book tokens on Nancy Drew books, since I'd probably lose interest pretty soon, but they never actively stopped me. Since I was reading Tolkien and Rosemary Sutcliff and the like at the same time, I doubt they were really worried. My local library didn't approve of Nancy Drew or the Famous Five, so buying was the only option for these types.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-22 01:54 pm (UTC)Her: "[Lil], one of these days I am going to get you to like Dickens!"
Me: "I don't think so, Miss, but it's okay. I like Tennyson and you don't."
Her: "True. Best leave it at that then."
no subject
Date: 2008-01-22 02:54 pm (UTC)* Just thought of some - Shakespeare plays.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-22 03:22 pm (UTC)Oh! I've just remembered one book I did that school that I hated: Sons and Lovers.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-22 03:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-23 08:38 pm (UTC)- Creatrix
no subject
Date: 2008-01-22 03:52 pm (UTC)Dumas is great fun :-D Though I suspect if my Mum had remembered the details of the story, she wouldn't have considered some bits suitable for the 9 year old me ;-)
no subject
Date: 2008-01-22 04:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-23 11:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-23 08:21 pm (UTC)But fortunately for me, most of the rest of the usual suspects I got to first. And my mother made sure I'd seen Shakespeare on stage years before we were expected to read them in class.
- Creatrix