On reading for pleasure

[ladyofastolat]

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.

Comments

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

When I'm in a school, I often say "put your hands up if you've ever started a reading book you think you'll like, got half way through it and thought 'This is boring. I don't want to read any more of this'" The children look really nervous, hands hovering, not sure if they're allowed to admit to this. I then put my hand up firmly and say, "I have." I then tell them this is perfectly okay - that I do it all the time, and I bet all their teachers have, too. (I glare at the teachers until they nod. To their credit, most teachers have already put their hands up before I have to start glaring.) The children then put their hands up with a visible sigh of relief. I find it very sad.

I do the same with asking them if they've ever read a book more than once. They're more happy to admit this without being prompted, but even then, some look guilty.

[chainmailmaiden]

I thought this about The Lord of the Rings the first time I tried to read it. Admittedly I was seven at the time, my parents had got it for me because I'd enjoyed The Hobbit so much. Once it became clear the book wasn't about Bilbo, I was bitterly disappointed and gave up. It was 2 years before I picked it up again and then I was hooked and had to be prised away from it to go to bed or school :-)

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

You're great.

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

She is that.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

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.

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

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.