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Originally Posted by BWinmill
Here's the thing: reading is consumption rather than creation. While reading can be used to improve oneself, it will never improve the world in itself. Learning how to read or improving reading proficiency may be a personal accomplishment, but reading in quantity is not an achievement for the greater good. In other words: you would accomplish pretty much the same thing if you had a TV watching competition.
A discussion like this may make sense if they were talking about writing competitions, because writing is an act of creation, but they aren't.
A program like this may have made sense if they were setting goalposts to encourage reading, rather than an outright competition, but they didn't.
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Science requires large quantities of reading, and requires a good memory as well. Finding your way around a library, and quickly finding books on a given topic are also useful skills.
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Originally Posted by rkomar
His offense was making the competition useless for promoting reading among the rest of the kids, who could probably use some prodding in that direction. The seven-book-a-day kid doesn't need any more encouragement to read. I really don't see the need to bring the tall poppy syndrome into this.
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Actually this is the 1.5-book-a-day kid. And the point of the competition is not about reading any book, but reading books on a given topic. Despite Jovvi's theory that this is about getting some kids in the club to read more despite the fact that they haven't learned the joy of reading, I think that it is far more likely that the topics were badly chosen and didn't hold the children's interest and the librarian is trying to blame the result of her lack of understanding of what book topics would hold the interest of children on the achievement of a 9 year old kid.
The example from the article was that the summer theme from a few years ago was centered on regions of the United States.
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Kids were supposed to read a book on each section of the country. A few children dropped out of the program because they didn’t like the subject matter, Casey said, but Tyler read at least one book on each of the 50 states.
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If you only plan on reading 10 books, you will have to put in effort to find 10 books to cover the sections, and hold your interest as well.
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Originally Posted by Andrew H.
This is not some Harrison Bergeron-esque morality play where the librarian is objecting because someone is better than the other kids and everyone should be equal. She's objecting because the program is not helping the rest of the kids read. This comes from using a winner-takes-all approach to encourage everyone to read, which is a stupid approach when you want *everyone* to read.
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I'm pretty sure that hearing about someone's great achievements is supposed to be motivational.
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Originally Posted by Andrew H.
We have grades in schools, but it's not like only the valedictorian is allowed to graduate.
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Right, in school everyone with passing grades graduates and you have one valedictorian. In this case everyone who read 10 books goes to the party and you have one kid-who-read-most-books. The librarian would pick the valedictorian's name out of a hat.