Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
But seriously...why does this always seem to come up? In my experience, the desire " to read" is sparked long before a child starts being assigned "chore fiction" to read in school. And I've yet to meet the child whose passion for reading was extinguished by academic reading assignments. Case in point: these articles are almost invariably written by people who still love to read even after the horrible ordeals they were put through. Waaaah!  |
People whose love of reading was squashed before they hit their teen years rarely remember it at all. They assume that reading was a kid-thing, and they enjoyed a bit of it when they were very young, but they don't like it now.
They don't think "school taught me to hate reading." There were plenty of things they liked when they were 8, and did some of in school, and didn't care for by the time they were 15. Playing kickball. Drinking milk out of little cartons. Coloring with crayons and using glitter on art projects. They don't assume that school taught them to hate these things; they assume that they outgrew them, and that some people loved them enough to keep doing them even after they were no longer necessary.
And while most avid readers didn't have their interest in reading killed by school, a lot of them won't touch "the classics" because of how schools taught them.
Classics are often taught without giving kids the context to understand them--Dickens' rich characters and complex storylines lose a lot if you know nothing about Victorian England and need a dictionary every other paragraph to catch some new word. Shakespeare's powerful scansion loses something on the page instead of spoken, and loses more if you don't know the proper pronunciation. And again, consulting a dictionary twice a page is a great way to lose track of the story.
And kids aren't given the classics and told, "read this! It's awesome!" They're told, "read this, and be ready to explain what makes this story Great Literature." And they
don't know. They haven't read a thousand other works of literature to know why these stand out as great. They don't know what mediocre literature looks like--and all through school, nobody will tell them, other than modern YA fic, which is "everything you enjoy reading because it's about the kinds of things that happen in your life." So they're told that the stories that have direct appeal to them are pretty much worthless, and these stories about places they've never been to and people who act like nobody they know, are Great Literature.
No wonder people turn away from the classics, even when they're not forced to read them, even when they do have the life experience to understand them. They spent over a decade picking up the message "Classic = unrealistic and boring but someone says it's important; Books-I-like are never classics."