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

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Oh nonsense! Hours and hours of critical source analysis in history O level and from my vague memory of teaching it, just as much in history GCSE. It was all about the viewpoints and bias and the 'can we believe this' stuff, surely that has not changed?

And I don't believe that cynicism about government messages and national media has anything to do with education either.

The great skill needed here is getting under someone else's skin and understanding their learning experience and how it's different to your own, and I am not sure that is something that can or should be taught by the state. It's something that you absorb osmotically by bouncing off different people and opinions as you move through life.

Some people are just born with a sort of shell round them like a conker, and can't do it. Or so I believe.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

example: on a dog rescue forum, several people who are in a specialist way well known were asked by the media to comment on a particular dog-related news story. A couple of them were seriously misquoted, yet even with the people who actually said the quotes right there going 'this is not what I said' people were posting 'did you see what X said, I would have thought she would have known better'.

If someone won't believe the media has just made something up when the person about whom it was made up is right there telling you, then I'm not sure what more effective learning technique you could possibly use. Maybe you shut them in a box and zap them with electrodes whenever they show any sign of believing the written word...

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

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.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

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.

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

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.

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

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?

[bunn.livejournal.com]

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!

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

My dissent sought to be more collective, in that I berated the choice of books and was uncomfortable with joining the dissenters who read ahead (though I did); I never went as far as reading other books, though.

'Official channels' I too learned partly through trial and error, largely when editing my school newspaper or soliciting for advertising in my brief and dispiriting career in student journalism.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I was hugely arrogant when it came to Eng Lit, but I think with some justification: the progress of the class was so painfully slow, with information spelled out in such moronic detail that I really don't think I could have stuck with it.

Our teachers were uninspired and had a tendency to teach by dictating notes which the class transcribed. I perfected the art of writing with one half of my brain while reading a book with the other half. (thinks: I wonder if this is why I can't do sums? I think the sums half of my brain was the one I made write notes while the rest was off having fun.)

Oh, how my teachers must have hated me. :-D

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

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.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

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?

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

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!")