Quote:
Originally Posted by Rumpelteazer
And then they wonder why (young) adults have no interest in reading. I was lucky to grow up with a mother who reads a lot for fun and always let me choose whatever I wanted to read (it really upset the librarians that she allowed me to read Stephen King's It in English when I was only 13). If you never get in contact with books you like the ones the schools want you to read are not exactly encouraging.
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Part of the issue is that many folks never learn to view reading as pleasurable. It's a
chore they do because they
have to, and dropped as soon as it's not necessary.
My SO's nephews are an example. Her late older brother was a ferocious reader. His wife was not. And dad would come home from work and plunk himself down in front of the TV while he waited for dinner to be ready. Guess what habits his sons picked up? (I watched the older one go into an alpha trance when the TV went on.)
I've always read anything that didn't read me first, and some that did. I know where I got it. My mother was a voracious reader, and read
to me when I was a small child. She toild me when I was older that I had the basic idea before I could do it myself - she'd fast forward through what she was reading to me before bedtime to get on to other chores, and I'd say "No, mommy! You skipped
this part!", and point unerringly at the section she'd skipped.
At a literary SF convention years back, a group us us at dinner were discussing declining standards of literacy. I asked "How many of you had parents who read
to you when you were small children?"
Every hand at the table was raised. I've been telling people for years "Want your kids to read for pleasure? Set an example. Read
to them before they are able to do it themselves, and demonstrate that it's
fun"
(And elsewhere here a while back there was the question of when to get a kid an eBook reader. My response was "First, you want them to
read. Start by reading
to them to demonstrate it's desirable. Do so
using a reader, to show it's a tool that can be used, and let them learn to use it under supervision. When the kid starts asking about getting one of their own,
then you can think about which to get.)
I got force fed stuff in school, and still can't deal with some of it. While I understand why it's considered classic English literature, for example, I still can't stomach Dickens. But I'd already formed the habit of reading for pleasure, so my dislikes were specific, not a general disinclination formed by poor reading choices made by schools.
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Dennis