Reading Matters: How Education Turns us off to Reading

You have to love a book whose dedication reads: "Parents, teachers, librarians, please on no account use these pages as an instrument of torture."

I've just finished one of the most engaging and inspiring books on reading that I have ever come across. Originally published as Comme un roman, this book has recently been translated into English as The Rights of the Reader, with delightfully whimsical illustrations by Quentin Blake.

The author, Daniel Pennac, taught for many years in the lower-income areas of Paris, and his book is a passionate defense of reading for pleasure that takes both the child's perspective and the world-weary outlook of a teacher who is caught between state requirements and how he would really like to teach kids to read.

For the many teachers in the U.S. who increasingly find themselves having to "teach to the test," Pennac's ironic perspective on the institutional demands of teachers and students, and his disdain for easy answers to the problem of falling reading rates -- television, the Internet, consumerism-- makes this a particularly rewarding book to read.

Pennac sympathizes with the plight of the teacher, who often has little control over what books to teach or how to teach them. In one section, he describes the experience of grading papers on the topic: "What do you think of Flaubert's Advice to his Friend Louise Collett, "Read to Live"?

After making it through a few of these, he realizes that all the kids are only saying what they think he wants to hear.

The arguments have a habit of repeating themselves. He's getting annoyed now. His students keep parroting reading matters, reading matters, the endless litany of the educational establishment: reading matters. When every sentence proves they never read!

As a counter to this deadening dogma, Pennac offers his own subversive bill of rights for the reader, including:

1. The Right Not to Read
2. The Right to Skip
3. The Right Not to Finish A Book
4. The Right to Read it Again
5. The Right to Read Anything
6. The Right to Mistake a Book for Real Life (Viva Don Quixote!)
7. The Right to Read Anywhere
8. The Right to Dip In
9. The Right to Read Out Loud
10. The Right to be Quiet

In other words, Pennac wants to free readers from the tyranny of the English class, where the joy of reading is followed by the pain of analysis, and then by the anguish of having to construct an "argument" about the book's meaning, and finally the torture of putting it down on paper.

By the time kids become adults and no longer have to read, Pennac believes that most have either lost the desire to read on their own or find it hard to justify the time reading requires. "Time to read is always time stolen...from the tyranny of living."

Our educational systems, with their rigid curricula and standard tests, ensure that too many of us have lost the experience of reading for pleasure by the time we graduate from high school and replaced those warm memories of childhood bedtime stories with harrowing recollections of the drudgery of trying to get through 300+ pages before we had to take a test or turn in a paper.

Reading like this is like trying to concentrate on the page with the Sword of Damocles hanging over your head by a rapidly fraying rope.

But Pennac's book is far from pessimistic. He acknowledges that reading is an individual, paradoxical, often inexplicable experience:

We live in groups because we're sociable, but we read because we know we're alone. Reading offers a kind of companionship that takes no one's place, but that no one can replace either...Its tiny secret links remind us of how paradoxically happy we are to be alive, while illuminating how tragically absurd life is. So our reasons for reading are as strange as our reasons for living. And no one has a right to call that intimacy to account.

In Pennac's ideal world, children would have the time and the freedom to read whatever books they wanted without having to answer adult inquiries about them. That intimate bond between reader and author, mediated by text, would remain inviolate. And certainly, if we lessened the dreary hours of homework we impose on our children and rewarded them just for the act of reading (as opposed to spending all their free time with "media" of one sort or another, we could make headway towards this ideal.

So, read, Pennac tells us, but let no one tell you what, when, where, why, or how to do it.