I'm not sure I agree that school sucks the joy out of reading. I have been able to read, and loved to read, ever since I can remember. Certainly before I started school. And my parents encouraged this, when they weren't taking books away from me to force me to do something else, like sleep or chores.
But my childhood world never had enough books in it. Never. My parents could only rarely be persuaded to purchase more books for me, because as my mother put it "You use them up too fast!" And the town we lived in was too small and too blue-collar / rural to support a public library.
One of the best parts of starting school in the fall was getting a whole new stack of textbooks. I would read them cover to cover. My classes never got to the end of their texts, but I always did! And classes where we read literature? Sign me up! I not only read the books assigned in my own classes, I read the books assigned in my sister's classes (if she happened to get a new one - she was a year younger than me) and in classes that my friends took without me. Sometimes I read their textbooks too. The only boring part was that often, we'd be assigned something I'd already read.
Also, there was a library at the school. I was allowed to check out two books per week from there, and I could read additional books during that one-hour weekly visit. That was 2 more books a week than I could get in the summer. And teachers would sometimes lend books, especially once I was old enough to read what they were reading.
Maybe the trick to getting kids to enjoy their school books, is to inculcate a love of reading, and then follow it with chronic scarcity.
