Why Kids Hate Reading: An Addict’s Perspective
I was lucky. By the time school had started requiring us to read this or that novel, I had long been hooked on reading for purely leisurely enjoyment. As a child who was clearly not born to play a sport in the big leagues (thanks mom and dad) and whose permitted television stations were limited to shows on PBS, I quickly adopted reading as my diversion of choice. I tore through books with an uncharacteristic tenacity and considered myself a master speed-reader by third grade. I loved (and still do) that I could create worlds and characters in my own head that were unconstrained by the whims, opinions, and perspectives of Hollywood. Through this, I could transport myself into stories that felt exponentially more real than anything a flat screen could hope to compete with.
During particularly boring stretches of my education, I would find myself reading about a book a day. Unlike most parents who try and force their kids to read, mine were so sick of my habits that they took to hiding books in household appliances to keep me from reading too much. I consider my pleasure-reading streak, which lasted up until about 10th grade, to be by far the greatest educational experience of my life. I gained a more solid foundation in history, science, economics, English, philosophy, and just about everything through reading outside of the classroom then I ever did in school.
It is thus not surprising that, after the incredibly enjoyable self-selected reading I had been doing on my own for years, I detested a large majority of the reading required of me by the California public school system. I speak for most of my classmates when I say that just the thought of Island of the Blue Dolphins, Boy of the Painted Cave, Huckleberry Finn, and virtually every other in-class-novel that I was forced to read still gives me the chills. The only upside to in-class reading was that I was able read whatever far superior book I was reading for fun under the façade of required reading. If school had been my first foray into literature, I can safely say that I would not be a “reader” as I consider myself today. My own experiences have led me to the conclusion that the strictness in school literature requirements and lack of breadth and in permitted genres to choose from for said requirement is one of the biggest problems with education in America. Nevertheless, I believe that this problem is also easily fixed.
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