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.

In Defense of the Berenstain Bears and other Mediocre Books Your Kids Like to Read

Last week, Jan Berenstain, beloved co-author of the Berenstain Bears series, died at the age of 88. Within a short time, along with many tributes to the author, a number of postings appeared that were less complimentary.

On Slate, Hanna Rosin wrote a post titled "Berenstain Bores," in which she responded to the end of Berenstain series with the words: "Good riddance!" and noted that among her friends, the series is known "as the one that makes us dread the bedtime routine the most." Drew Magary of Dadspin did Rosin one better with his "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, You're F----d: Ten Tips for Avoiding Terrible Children's Books," where he observed that "with the wrong book, reading to your kids is MURDER."

Now I don't dispute that the Berenstain Bears books (and others like them) are repetitive, formulaic, and clearly the bane of many parents' existence. I received any number of curses from my brother after I sent his kids a copy of Good Night, Moon, another book parents love to hate. “I've had to read that book a thousand times,” he complained, “and you can't skip anything because they stop you and remind you that you've left something out.”

Believe me. I've been there and done that, reading some book that bored me to tears but enthralled one of my children. One of them had a particular fondness for a large format version of Disney's The Fox and Hound, which I hadn't liked much, even as a movie. The print version seemed to go on and on forever, and I kept finding myself lapsing into a monotone, or trying, surreptitiously, to skip a few pages.

But after parenting three children, all of whom had very different reading styles and varying degrees of interest in reading, I've learned one thing: It doesn't matter whether your kids are reading endless variations on If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, or the Twilight or Hardy Boys series. If they are reading at all, be grateful.

And do not mock them for it, or even make snide remarks you think they might overhear. Save your mordant wit for your online community or a night out with other parents sans kids.

I myself confess to having devoured the entire Encyclopedia Brown detective series, which merits just as much of the kind of mud people have been slinging at the Berenstain Bears. But it did get me started on reading for clues, which meant I was actually paying attention to what I read, instead of racing through to the end.

I also owned one Berenstain Bears book and read it many times. But it never engaged my interest like other book series such as Curious George, Madeleine, or Barbar the Elephant, whose plots I actually remember because they were full of characters who were mischevious, courageous, and unconventional.

So for all of the parents out there who dread having to read books that bore them to their children, I have to say, “Get over it! Reading to your kids is not about you. It's about fostering their love of the written word until they reach the age where they have some discrimination over what kind of writing is good and what is mediocre.”

The fact is that children love repetition, and they love the comfort of knowing exactly how a story will end, however, ridiculous or contrived that conclusion may seem to their parents.

I can still recite (with pleasure):

In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines
Lived twelve little girls in two straight lines
In two straight lines they broke their bread
And brushed their teeth and went to bed.
They smiled at the good and frowned at the bad
And sometimes they were very sad,
They left the house at half past
In two straight lines
The smallest one was Madeleine.

And I immediately call up the densely illustrated pages that represented a Paris I did not yet know, with its bridges crossing the Seine, and the Eiffel Tower or Notre Dame in the distance. I only knew that this was a magical city, and that I wanted to be Madeleine, standing up to bullies like The Black Hat, telling a tiger “poo poo” and balancing precariously on a railing next to a river.

Now that my youngest is 12 and doesn't have the patience to listen to me reading aloud or the willingness to listen to an audiobook in the car, I have only memories of what it was like to cuddle up in bed with the kids and their stuffed animals and their books, usually a pile of them.

Although my recollections cast a rosy glow over these occasions, I know that there were plenty of evenings when I was too tired or cranky to do them justice, and when I resented having to read a particularly dreary book one more time. But it must not have been too awful because I can scarcely bring any of those titles to mind.

So why am I not concerned about kids wanting to read repetitive, trite books full of cliches and stereotypes?

Frankly, it's because what kids read is the least of our problems when it comes to reading. We live in a culture where reading rates, especially among young people, have decreased substantially, as more and more kids spend their time on "media" rather than on books.

Children six and under spend more than twice as much time with "screen media" (2 hours) as they do reading or being read to (39 minutes). And it gets worse as they reach their teen years. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of June 2011, those between the ages of 15 and 19 spent an average of six minutes per weekend day reading for pleasure and over an hour on the computer or other media devices. At that rate, it would take you weeks to get through a magazine, much less a book.

When I read statistics like these, I know that all those hours spent in bedtime reading were worth it because it allowed me to give my children the foundation to keep them reading as adults, whether they choose to read mysteries, graphic novels, thrillers, or comic books. And whatever they read, I won't sneer at them for their choices. I'll just be grateful that they're still reading.

The Twilight Saga, or Why We Keep Trying to Censor what Teens Read

In carpool a couple of weeks ago, a fourth-grade girl I've come to think of as a surrogate daughter, mentioned that her mom didn't want her to read Twilight, the teen vampire love story that's been such a huge publishing success and will soon hit the big screen.

“Oh, my son Tomas read that,” I told her, and “I read it too while I was recovering from a bad fall.” (And I didn't feel capable of reading anything too complicated, I thought to myself, but I didn't say that out loud.) “There's nothing bad in it,” I said to her, "and if you want me to tell your mom that I've read it and that I think it's okay for you to read, I can do that,” I promised her.

“Oh, could you?” she asked hopefully. “I told her I'd rather read Twilight than get my own cell phone and that tells you how much it means to me.”

“It sure does,” I laughed, and then I started thinking to myself about the perennial question of why we as parents get so worried about what our kids read that we want to censor certain books.

So I started asking people – okay, other moms--what they thought about Twilight. [If I'd asked any dads, they would mostly likely have give me blank stares, but that's another blog topic.)

My sister told me that the book was a source of controversy at her daughter's Christian school. I found out that the mom of my would-be-Twilight-reader wasn't nearly as worried about the book as her college-aged daughter was because her oldest daughter thought that the heroine wasn't a “good role model.” “What I think really upsets her,” my friend told me, “is that wanting to read this book shows that her little sister is growing up too fast.”

After all Twilight does touch on all those adolescent issues that raise parental (and big sister) hackles: falling in love, wondering about sex, having relationships (platonic or otherwise) behind a parent's back, having your daughter getting involved with wrong kid of guy (where “vampire” stands in for any race/class/religion/or other difference that makes you uncomfortable).

For my friend's older daughter, Twilight also seemed to send the wrong kind of message to her little sister: in it the heroine spends a lot time wondering if she's good enough for the guy; he tends to be controlling, even bullying on occasion, and his outrageous good looks, material wealth, and “I know more than you do, little girl” attitude isn't quite enough to offset his equally out-sized angst about how he might endanger her or even worse give in to the temptation to turn her into a vampire like himself.

But the real question that lingers for me about the Twilight phenomenon isn't so much about whether it's a “good” book or a “bad” book, but why we worry so much about what adolescents, and especially adolescent girls, read.

I'd be the first to admit that I share my friend's oldest daughter's concern about her little sister reading books that start to erode the boundaries of childhood. There are good reasons for having “children's sections” in public libraries in order to provide a rich, age-appropriate environment in which young people can begin to explore their world, including its darker sides.

Yet children's books like Holes, Are you there God? It's me, Margaret?, and Bud, Not Buddy treat topics that a generation earlier we might not have considered “safe” for children: including abuse, abandonment, puberty, and the juvenile justice system. However, the authors of these same books write about these experiences in a way that children and adults can understand without being psychically threatened by them.

One of the hardest transitions we experience as parents is watching our children move from the relative innocence and wonder of childhood to the increased worldliness and skepticism that they begin to feel as young adults. If there's anyone I identified with in Twilight it was the well-meaning but easily fooled father who has no idea what's going on in his daughter's head or taking place in her bedroom where a vampire spends most evenings watching her sleep and trying to protect her from other vampires.

Perhaps what bothers parents most about what their teens are reading is this realization that we can no longer fully protect our children from the world and all its dangers.

In a strange way, it may seem more feasible to us keep our children safe from the fictional dangers contained in the pages of a book than to have to face our own limitations in keeping them safe from the world at large. Censorship can seem to offer a certain comfort to a parent, even if we're just like the father in Twilight, futilely trying to ward off threats we can't even see.

As the mother of three sons, two of whom are over the age of fifteen, I confess I've largely ceded the battle of trying to protect my adolescent children from any and all “negative” influences of media, video, books, music, pop culture, and their peers. I also have to confess that I might be a little less laissez-faire if I had a daughter. I just don't know what difference gender might make.

But what I have realized is that all I can really do at this stage of children's lives is to give them the skills to ask questions about what they hear, what they watch, and what they read.

They're going to read what they want, not necessarily what I want them to read. But I also know that if I'm willing to take the time to read some of the same books, we can at least start a conversation, even an argument, about what those books mean and why we value them differently. And that's one good way to recognize their passage to young adulthood.

For more good discussions of Twilight, see The Christian Science Monitor's "Chapter & Verse Blog," "I Don't Want my Kid Reading that Book"

http://features.csmonitor.com/books/2008/11/15/i-dont-want-my-kid-reading-that-book/