As someone who came to philosophy later in life without any formal education, this gives me a lot of hope that there is a place for me in the Great Conversation. Thank you! I love the image of your son being so enraptured in the banana that he forgot he was scared of falling. What an excellent metaphor for the effect the wisdom of philosophy has on us.
I think there is something to be said about the association between classic literature and high school English classes that brings about a weariness. I only really started reading again in 2021 and that was mostly to help research for my history podcast. I had a list of classics I wanted to read, but "knew" each would be a slog. It wasn't until I listened to Crime and Punishment that I realized how the problems that are often examined in classics are timeless. This was a revelation to me. I now have too many books to read and not nearly enough time (and the distractions we all face do not help). There are still some books that scare me, but I'm more open to them than I was three years ago.
On the note about kids reading, I have begun reading little golden books to my 9-month-old every night and can't wait for the day to read the Hobbit, or Narnia, or Earthsea to her and my future kids. If all I can do is make a few more avid readers in the world, I will have been successful.
I've taught typical grade 9 classics a million times and it wasn't until I taught Catcher in the Rye for maybe the fourth time that I started to appreciate various quotes/paragraphs. I could not connect to it at ALL in high school and I do think these books can be assigned too early.
I remember loving The Outsiders when I read it at home. When I read it in high school a couple years later, I was amazed at how boring it became lol.
Thank you for a very thoughtful observation. One thing I like most about reading outside of the context of school is that I have no time limit on how long it takes. Some things I read quickly and other may be nursed along over several months. I will have a mix of science, poetry, philosophy, novels, anime, and science fiction all going along together. They get finished when they get finished.
Love your insight that getting philosophy students to start with Plato sort of shatters their self-limiting belief that reading philosophy, especially ancient philosophy, is too hard for them.
It was also easy to consume difficult content back then. I didn't have a smartphone or a computer when I have in high school. All I had was a Nintendo, Harry Potter movies and LOTR trilogy on a DVD and books- all without internet access(don't get me started on kindle). I had time to consume difficult books. I had time to 'fail' at reading a difficult book.
Today I am plugged into the internet 24/7 with 100 different options or ways to consume the dumbest content ever produced. These options at first seem like they give us the freedom to choose what we want do with our time but in reality we are in a trap. A trap that is growing deeper and deeper every day. Its getting borderline impossible to quit these apps.
How am I supposed to find time for reading any book, let alone a difficult book, when I need a social media fix every 10 minutes?
We need an intervention like in the case of a crack addict. An option for social media to be taken away from us- be it forcibly.
I traveled a similar path. When I was in third grade my parents were told I was reading at a kindergarten level. I was labeled learning disabled and pulled out of class for tutoring. But then I stumbled on a a massive 1980s hardback copy of Lord of the Rings with a fold out map in my school library. I decided to read it...but I couldn't...not really. But I kept taking it out...month after month.
I read it with a dictionary, often going back over the parts I didn't get. I was fascinated...maybe a little obsessed. It probably took two years to get through the Hobbit and the LOTR trilogy.
My parents were shocked at my sixth grade graduation when I was called on stage to receive the President's Award for Educational Excellence. My teacher later told them I was the best reader in the class.
Yeah, it's hard to get good at hard things. But no one ever told me I couldn't do it. And I don't think I've struggled to read anything again.
Today, I don't think i would have done it. There would have been too many distractions, to many easier ways to find rapturous stories. Which makes me sad, because it feels like future generations will never be comfortable enough with reading for it to be an effortless hobby.
Well said! There were a some things this reminded me of that I've encountered recently. You might enjoy them too if you aren't familiar with them already.
"They have convinced themselves that they aren’t readers. They have convinced themselves that reading old books, especially difficult old books, is just too arduous, too boring, too pointless."
YES. You capture a key reason for the decline of reading. I like to remind students that stories are universal and we, as human beings, are ALL interested in stories. If they find a book boring, they just need to try a different story. A desire to read, then, can be cultivated. I always took great pride in making a story interesting to my students by pointing out how it was relevant to their lives; I loved seeing them go from being disinterested to genuinely engaged with a story.
I'd add that many parents are simply too busy – or perhaps even too disinterested themselves – to cultivate a desire to read in their children. One of the drawbacks of the rise of e-books, too, is that both parents and children are less likely to simply see and peruse books anymore.
Finally, I could write so much about the shift towards testing in the US...how it was backed by good intentions and a serious misreading of global educational outcomes. I distinctly recall then-SoEducation Arne Duncan talking about how great China's test scores were compared to the United States and thinking he misunderstood the Chinese system of education entirely. Still, the adoption of test-based assessment in the United States was perhaps less impactful on interest in reading than just the overall addiction to screens/entertainment among parents and children alike.
My first philosophy class threw the students in the deep end. There were no 100-level philosophy classes offered at my college. There was Philosophy 201 Ancient, Philosophy 202 Modern, and Philosophy 210 Ethics.
I took Philosophy 202 Modern. We read Descartes's Meditations; selections from Hume's Enquiry, Kant's First Critique (!), and Kierkegaard; Nietzsche's Genealogy; James's Will to Believe; and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.
My professor was really good, but I don't think having us read the First Critique was a good idea. To be fair, I probably got more out of reading the First Critique than reading Wittgenstein, because I had the historical background to see what Kant was reacting to, having just read Descartes and Hume. Philosophical Investigations without historical context is completely baffling.
Reading Hume, though, was what made me fall in love with philosophy.
In total agreement with you, Jared. Thanks for stating it so eloquently. As a recently bought out semi-retired English prof, I can attest to the self-defeatism among students towards reading. It's a sad situation. Many seem burned out and the techno-dystopic devices in their pockets aren't helping. I started to notice the sea change circa 2016. I basically gave up assigning challenging books after that.
Regarding "The Great Conversation," I wonder if you have read Robert M. Hutchins' essay of the same title (in volume 1 of the Great Books of the Western World set). It aligns with a lot of what you've talked about here.
I think the biggest issue is video. Video is inherently more engaging than reading. I believe we are hard wired to focus on moving images - I know a large portion of the brain is devoted to seeing, and I thought I read somewhere that movement grabs our attention.
I like reading. It gives me time to think about the ideas presented in a critical way, where I find that to be very difficult with video. I feel video is better able to manipulate my feelings and perceptions. This is one of the reasons I am very careful about watching documentaries - it is hard to watch them with a critical eye.
My biggest question about this is not getting kids to read more, but are they adapting better than I am in processing information acquired through video? When I lament lack of reading in younger people, is that really reflecting my skills vis a vis reading and video.
Great article once again. I think that there are some other things going on as well. Do the parents make time for reading not only for themselves (where the kids see it, Moms was at the breakfast table) but as well as reading to their children or allowing the child to read to them at bedtime? Is reading being taught as important not only in school but at home? Are parents taking their kids to the library and seeking out books that are appropriate for them? Are the schools using all the methods available to help teach the children? I was a phonics failure and had my hearing and vision checked by the state more times that I can count from 1st-3rd grades. I was tested by the reading specialist and put in a class that was designed to teach me how to read without phonics back then It wasn’t an expectation that a child be passed regardless if they could do the work or not. The No Kid Left Behind system is hurting children not helping them. The US as a whole places more emphasis on our entertainment than on basic education of our children. We expect teachers to be superheroes and pay them crap and expect them to be abused by the students and some parents, yet an actor can receive up to 80+ million a season to entertain us.
While you ask questions about what's happening at home and I want to emphasize that what you're promoting for home practice is desirable, I suspect that any assertions made about parents reading for themselves and to their children as well as taking kids to the library regularly to seek out appropriate books as widespread practice are nostalgic and possibly related to socio-economic class. The home practices you list are shown to be advantageous and are considered an enriched environment by educators. While those practices correspond to my home environment growing up, they absolutely did not for the majority of my peers at school, and from my parents' stories (they're first generation college students and avid readers) it certainly didn't for them. Educators cannot start from the assumption that these things are happening at home even if and when the educators encourage them. Maybe it's that I grew up around people in a blue collar environment and an area with a lot of poverty, but my experience was that adults doing that stuff was unusual. My mother's stories include active criticism for reading during her free time -- back in the 50s and 60s -- including things like telling her to put down her book and watch TV and her parents ripping up books she'd gone to the library and checked out on her own.
I can also tell you that I certainly had classmates passed through school unable to read back in the 70s and 80s. I watched them struggle with the textbooks when we were supposed to read them out loud, even as juniors and seniors in high school. Often I was the kid called over to tutor them and help them with their work. NKLB was instituted with the notion that it would help prevent passing kids along who could not do the work. I think it (and later Common Core with the continuation of testing culture) has a lot of problems and agree that testing culture is harmful. However, denying that there was a problem with passing students along earlier when they hadn't mastered the necessary skills doesn't address those problems and serves to obscure them. Meanwhile, my dyslexic kid could not do phonics to save his life but had to pass a reading test in 3rd grade to progress to 4th grade, as did all kids in the state we were in at the time. He was never pulled aside for extra instruction, as reading tests weren't specifically phonics tests and he could do the work he was expected to do.
I do agree with you about the expectation for teachers to be superheroes and about teaching being an underpaid profession without the respect given to other professionals. I would like to see class sizes lowered, pay increases, and more support in matters relating to discipline. I entered school right after the legislation passed requiring schools to educate students with disabilities (including learning disabilities) and to provide accommodations for them, and compliance with such things in addition to the testing culture just takes a lot of time and attention.
Thank you for this. I share your concern and some of the evaluation of the issue. For a little context, I am the parent of two college-aged kids.
I do have a couple of issues that I would like to elaborate upon. One is that one of my kids is dyslexic and essentially reads using context cues. (He can associate letters with sounds but has severe difficulty stringing sounds together to form words -- when tested in fifth grade he couldn't string three sounds together to form a nonsense word. Trying to learn via sight words, which was how they started the kids in school, was a disaster to the point where I just refused to work on it any more.) Where this hits him most strongly is not in reading longer passages in depth. He actually does well on that metric, though it is almost definitely slower for him than for someone who is not dyslexic as he reads and re-reads to ensure he has it right. That deficiency hits hardest in short passages with rapidly changing context. The excerpts were okay for him, they're long enough for some context, but reading isolated questions, understanding forms, and dealing with fill in the blank exercises in sentences are all difficult. Because he's dyslexic I don't know if this is going to be typical of kids who learned using context cues, but it's where I see the weaknesses.
Meanwhile, I'm going to assert that the testing culture is more pronounced and more disturbing than just the annual standardized testing and the preparation for such. I would like to encourage educators to reconsider their use of the Accelerated Reader program, which reaches into children's pleasure reading. I do not know if it's still being used the same way that it was, but I can tell you how it was used when my children were in elementary school. The books are all assigned reading levels and kids were tested on a program run by the same company at the beginning of each school year to determine their reading level. Children are then heavily encouraged to stick to or only slightly above that reading level, to read books that the school has purchased tests for, and then to be tested on the books they were ostensibly reading for pleasure. This is not part of the grade, which means FERPA rules didn't apply, so most classrooms had charts on the classroom wall showing how many points a student had for the term and there were prizes associated with earning certain numbers of points. Children were encouraged to read AR books during the summer and take tests over their summer reading at the beginning of the school year to boost their AR scores, and all the public libraries in the area had lists of what books the schools had tests for and the reading levels of those books.
I encouraged my kids to completely ignore this program. The one time a teacher leaned in on it with my oldest, it nearly destroyed her love of reading. The child was an early and avid reader. So....here's how to kill the love of reading! Going into that school year, it was difficult to get my daughter out of her pleasure reading to do other things. Seeing that the classroom had free reading time, she brought what she was reading at home (Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie, well within her tested reading level at the time) to school for that purpose. The teacher refused to believe the tests the school had administered and confiscated her book, insisting that she could not understand it. Then, with the support of the principal, she told us that our child would not be allowed to read books so far above grade level at school, that she would be confined to grade level or one grade above it (this is below where she had tested when she started Kindergarten), and that any books she tried to check out from the school library above that level would be sent back. Free reading during school became an unenthusiastic endeavor, but she would at least sink into what unfettered reading she had energy for at home. During winter break there was a metro area competition for the number of pages read over break. We didn't push this and she didn't seem super interested, but she was a bit curious about exactly how much she would get through, so we decided together to keep track. Left to her own devices, she got second place for her age bracket in our rather large metro area. This wouldn't have been a problem, but her teacher got wind of it when it was announced that she was a prize winner, and decided to raise her AR point goal for the spring term to ten times that of her peers, still constraining her by reading level. I watched her joyous reading at home turn into a slog as she worked to reach the goal set by her teacher. She evaluated every book she encountered for whether it was on the list and for its reading level. She did meet the goal, but the cost was high. When the summer break hit, she stopped reading for months. She did recover from this eventually, but only with me directly fighting her teachers over the use of the AR program and over them restricting her reading in such a manner, just letting her roam the bookshelves with no end goal in mind as she used to do, and lots of me reading out loud to her and her little brother. Both kids read challenging stuff for pleasure now.
This was obviously an extreme example, but I think it is fair to note that most current college students were trained in elementary school to always think of reading as something they would be tested on, that there is no such thing as reading solely for pleasure, and that they were actively discouraged from reading things considered to be "too hard." I'm not an expert in early education. However, I cannot help but think this would have negative effects on later willingness to challenge oneself with text, to sink into a text without thought of meeting some metric, or to read more deeply than meeting some short multiple choice test might measure.
As someone who came to philosophy later in life without any formal education, this gives me a lot of hope that there is a place for me in the Great Conversation. Thank you! I love the image of your son being so enraptured in the banana that he forgot he was scared of falling. What an excellent metaphor for the effect the wisdom of philosophy has on us.
I think there is something to be said about the association between classic literature and high school English classes that brings about a weariness. I only really started reading again in 2021 and that was mostly to help research for my history podcast. I had a list of classics I wanted to read, but "knew" each would be a slog. It wasn't until I listened to Crime and Punishment that I realized how the problems that are often examined in classics are timeless. This was a revelation to me. I now have too many books to read and not nearly enough time (and the distractions we all face do not help). There are still some books that scare me, but I'm more open to them than I was three years ago.
On the note about kids reading, I have begun reading little golden books to my 9-month-old every night and can't wait for the day to read the Hobbit, or Narnia, or Earthsea to her and my future kids. If all I can do is make a few more avid readers in the world, I will have been successful.
I've taught typical grade 9 classics a million times and it wasn't until I taught Catcher in the Rye for maybe the fourth time that I started to appreciate various quotes/paragraphs. I could not connect to it at ALL in high school and I do think these books can be assigned too early.
I remember loving The Outsiders when I read it at home. When I read it in high school a couple years later, I was amazed at how boring it became lol.
Thank you for a very thoughtful observation. One thing I like most about reading outside of the context of school is that I have no time limit on how long it takes. Some things I read quickly and other may be nursed along over several months. I will have a mix of science, poetry, philosophy, novels, anime, and science fiction all going along together. They get finished when they get finished.
Love your insight that getting philosophy students to start with Plato sort of shatters their self-limiting belief that reading philosophy, especially ancient philosophy, is too hard for them.
It was also easy to consume difficult content back then. I didn't have a smartphone or a computer when I have in high school. All I had was a Nintendo, Harry Potter movies and LOTR trilogy on a DVD and books- all without internet access(don't get me started on kindle). I had time to consume difficult books. I had time to 'fail' at reading a difficult book.
Today I am plugged into the internet 24/7 with 100 different options or ways to consume the dumbest content ever produced. These options at first seem like they give us the freedom to choose what we want do with our time but in reality we are in a trap. A trap that is growing deeper and deeper every day. Its getting borderline impossible to quit these apps.
How am I supposed to find time for reading any book, let alone a difficult book, when I need a social media fix every 10 minutes?
We need an intervention like in the case of a crack addict. An option for social media to be taken away from us- be it forcibly.
Thanks for the free article.
Wow, that cover of The Hobbit is truly hideous. What were they thinking?
My childhood paperback copy of The Hobbit, which I still have, has Tolkien's own art on the cover, with the barrels floating out of Mirkwood.
It's strange, but at least they changed course later on. Modern editions of Tolkien typically look very good, save for a few minor details.
But I have a lot of fondness for that paperback. I remember stuffing it in my backpack every morning for a good long time.
I kind of like that cover. Haha.
I traveled a similar path. When I was in third grade my parents were told I was reading at a kindergarten level. I was labeled learning disabled and pulled out of class for tutoring. But then I stumbled on a a massive 1980s hardback copy of Lord of the Rings with a fold out map in my school library. I decided to read it...but I couldn't...not really. But I kept taking it out...month after month.
I read it with a dictionary, often going back over the parts I didn't get. I was fascinated...maybe a little obsessed. It probably took two years to get through the Hobbit and the LOTR trilogy.
My parents were shocked at my sixth grade graduation when I was called on stage to receive the President's Award for Educational Excellence. My teacher later told them I was the best reader in the class.
Yeah, it's hard to get good at hard things. But no one ever told me I couldn't do it. And I don't think I've struggled to read anything again.
Today, I don't think i would have done it. There would have been too many distractions, to many easier ways to find rapturous stories. Which makes me sad, because it feels like future generations will never be comfortable enough with reading for it to be an effortless hobby.
Well said! There were a some things this reminded me of that I've encountered recently. You might enjoy them too if you aren't familiar with them already.
One is a talk Michael Silverblatt gave on his love of reading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SfWDUzXlNw
The other is a feature that Lapham's Quarterly used to do on the reading habits of famous people from history: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/search/node/reading%20list
John Stuart Mill's childhood was impressive: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/ways-learning/reading-list
"They have convinced themselves that they aren’t readers. They have convinced themselves that reading old books, especially difficult old books, is just too arduous, too boring, too pointless."
YES. You capture a key reason for the decline of reading. I like to remind students that stories are universal and we, as human beings, are ALL interested in stories. If they find a book boring, they just need to try a different story. A desire to read, then, can be cultivated. I always took great pride in making a story interesting to my students by pointing out how it was relevant to their lives; I loved seeing them go from being disinterested to genuinely engaged with a story.
I'd add that many parents are simply too busy – or perhaps even too disinterested themselves – to cultivate a desire to read in their children. One of the drawbacks of the rise of e-books, too, is that both parents and children are less likely to simply see and peruse books anymore.
Finally, I could write so much about the shift towards testing in the US...how it was backed by good intentions and a serious misreading of global educational outcomes. I distinctly recall then-SoEducation Arne Duncan talking about how great China's test scores were compared to the United States and thinking he misunderstood the Chinese system of education entirely. Still, the adoption of test-based assessment in the United States was perhaps less impactful on interest in reading than just the overall addiction to screens/entertainment among parents and children alike.
I commend you, Jared, on your choice to illustrate your Substack posts with real art, and not AI-generated slop like most other Substackers use.
It would be nice to have captions with the art though, with artist name and date if known, or the source work if it's an illustration.
I’ll try to do that in the future. Nearly all of it is from the Met’s publicly available digital collection.
My first philosophy class threw the students in the deep end. There were no 100-level philosophy classes offered at my college. There was Philosophy 201 Ancient, Philosophy 202 Modern, and Philosophy 210 Ethics.
I took Philosophy 202 Modern. We read Descartes's Meditations; selections from Hume's Enquiry, Kant's First Critique (!), and Kierkegaard; Nietzsche's Genealogy; James's Will to Believe; and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.
My professor was really good, but I don't think having us read the First Critique was a good idea. To be fair, I probably got more out of reading the First Critique than reading Wittgenstein, because I had the historical background to see what Kant was reacting to, having just read Descartes and Hume. Philosophical Investigations without historical context is completely baffling.
Reading Hume, though, was what made me fall in love with philosophy.
In total agreement with you, Jared. Thanks for stating it so eloquently. As a recently bought out semi-retired English prof, I can attest to the self-defeatism among students towards reading. It's a sad situation. Many seem burned out and the techno-dystopic devices in their pockets aren't helping. I started to notice the sea change circa 2016. I basically gave up assigning challenging books after that.
Regarding "The Great Conversation," I wonder if you have read Robert M. Hutchins' essay of the same title (in volume 1 of the Great Books of the Western World set). It aligns with a lot of what you've talked about here.
Love this!
I think the biggest issue is video. Video is inherently more engaging than reading. I believe we are hard wired to focus on moving images - I know a large portion of the brain is devoted to seeing, and I thought I read somewhere that movement grabs our attention.
I like reading. It gives me time to think about the ideas presented in a critical way, where I find that to be very difficult with video. I feel video is better able to manipulate my feelings and perceptions. This is one of the reasons I am very careful about watching documentaries - it is hard to watch them with a critical eye.
My biggest question about this is not getting kids to read more, but are they adapting better than I am in processing information acquired through video? When I lament lack of reading in younger people, is that really reflecting my skills vis a vis reading and video.
Cue The Buggles https://youtu.be/W8r-tXRLazs?si=bX4neXDND99pjB63
Great article once again. I think that there are some other things going on as well. Do the parents make time for reading not only for themselves (where the kids see it, Moms was at the breakfast table) but as well as reading to their children or allowing the child to read to them at bedtime? Is reading being taught as important not only in school but at home? Are parents taking their kids to the library and seeking out books that are appropriate for them? Are the schools using all the methods available to help teach the children? I was a phonics failure and had my hearing and vision checked by the state more times that I can count from 1st-3rd grades. I was tested by the reading specialist and put in a class that was designed to teach me how to read without phonics back then It wasn’t an expectation that a child be passed regardless if they could do the work or not. The No Kid Left Behind system is hurting children not helping them. The US as a whole places more emphasis on our entertainment than on basic education of our children. We expect teachers to be superheroes and pay them crap and expect them to be abused by the students and some parents, yet an actor can receive up to 80+ million a season to entertain us.
While you ask questions about what's happening at home and I want to emphasize that what you're promoting for home practice is desirable, I suspect that any assertions made about parents reading for themselves and to their children as well as taking kids to the library regularly to seek out appropriate books as widespread practice are nostalgic and possibly related to socio-economic class. The home practices you list are shown to be advantageous and are considered an enriched environment by educators. While those practices correspond to my home environment growing up, they absolutely did not for the majority of my peers at school, and from my parents' stories (they're first generation college students and avid readers) it certainly didn't for them. Educators cannot start from the assumption that these things are happening at home even if and when the educators encourage them. Maybe it's that I grew up around people in a blue collar environment and an area with a lot of poverty, but my experience was that adults doing that stuff was unusual. My mother's stories include active criticism for reading during her free time -- back in the 50s and 60s -- including things like telling her to put down her book and watch TV and her parents ripping up books she'd gone to the library and checked out on her own.
I can also tell you that I certainly had classmates passed through school unable to read back in the 70s and 80s. I watched them struggle with the textbooks when we were supposed to read them out loud, even as juniors and seniors in high school. Often I was the kid called over to tutor them and help them with their work. NKLB was instituted with the notion that it would help prevent passing kids along who could not do the work. I think it (and later Common Core with the continuation of testing culture) has a lot of problems and agree that testing culture is harmful. However, denying that there was a problem with passing students along earlier when they hadn't mastered the necessary skills doesn't address those problems and serves to obscure them. Meanwhile, my dyslexic kid could not do phonics to save his life but had to pass a reading test in 3rd grade to progress to 4th grade, as did all kids in the state we were in at the time. He was never pulled aside for extra instruction, as reading tests weren't specifically phonics tests and he could do the work he was expected to do.
I do agree with you about the expectation for teachers to be superheroes and about teaching being an underpaid profession without the respect given to other professionals. I would like to see class sizes lowered, pay increases, and more support in matters relating to discipline. I entered school right after the legislation passed requiring schools to educate students with disabilities (including learning disabilities) and to provide accommodations for them, and compliance with such things in addition to the testing culture just takes a lot of time and attention.
Thank you for this. I share your concern and some of the evaluation of the issue. For a little context, I am the parent of two college-aged kids.
I do have a couple of issues that I would like to elaborate upon. One is that one of my kids is dyslexic and essentially reads using context cues. (He can associate letters with sounds but has severe difficulty stringing sounds together to form words -- when tested in fifth grade he couldn't string three sounds together to form a nonsense word. Trying to learn via sight words, which was how they started the kids in school, was a disaster to the point where I just refused to work on it any more.) Where this hits him most strongly is not in reading longer passages in depth. He actually does well on that metric, though it is almost definitely slower for him than for someone who is not dyslexic as he reads and re-reads to ensure he has it right. That deficiency hits hardest in short passages with rapidly changing context. The excerpts were okay for him, they're long enough for some context, but reading isolated questions, understanding forms, and dealing with fill in the blank exercises in sentences are all difficult. Because he's dyslexic I don't know if this is going to be typical of kids who learned using context cues, but it's where I see the weaknesses.
Meanwhile, I'm going to assert that the testing culture is more pronounced and more disturbing than just the annual standardized testing and the preparation for such. I would like to encourage educators to reconsider their use of the Accelerated Reader program, which reaches into children's pleasure reading. I do not know if it's still being used the same way that it was, but I can tell you how it was used when my children were in elementary school. The books are all assigned reading levels and kids were tested on a program run by the same company at the beginning of each school year to determine their reading level. Children are then heavily encouraged to stick to or only slightly above that reading level, to read books that the school has purchased tests for, and then to be tested on the books they were ostensibly reading for pleasure. This is not part of the grade, which means FERPA rules didn't apply, so most classrooms had charts on the classroom wall showing how many points a student had for the term and there were prizes associated with earning certain numbers of points. Children were encouraged to read AR books during the summer and take tests over their summer reading at the beginning of the school year to boost their AR scores, and all the public libraries in the area had lists of what books the schools had tests for and the reading levels of those books.
I encouraged my kids to completely ignore this program. The one time a teacher leaned in on it with my oldest, it nearly destroyed her love of reading. The child was an early and avid reader. So....here's how to kill the love of reading! Going into that school year, it was difficult to get my daughter out of her pleasure reading to do other things. Seeing that the classroom had free reading time, she brought what she was reading at home (Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie, well within her tested reading level at the time) to school for that purpose. The teacher refused to believe the tests the school had administered and confiscated her book, insisting that she could not understand it. Then, with the support of the principal, she told us that our child would not be allowed to read books so far above grade level at school, that she would be confined to grade level or one grade above it (this is below where she had tested when she started Kindergarten), and that any books she tried to check out from the school library above that level would be sent back. Free reading during school became an unenthusiastic endeavor, but she would at least sink into what unfettered reading she had energy for at home. During winter break there was a metro area competition for the number of pages read over break. We didn't push this and she didn't seem super interested, but she was a bit curious about exactly how much she would get through, so we decided together to keep track. Left to her own devices, she got second place for her age bracket in our rather large metro area. This wouldn't have been a problem, but her teacher got wind of it when it was announced that she was a prize winner, and decided to raise her AR point goal for the spring term to ten times that of her peers, still constraining her by reading level. I watched her joyous reading at home turn into a slog as she worked to reach the goal set by her teacher. She evaluated every book she encountered for whether it was on the list and for its reading level. She did meet the goal, but the cost was high. When the summer break hit, she stopped reading for months. She did recover from this eventually, but only with me directly fighting her teachers over the use of the AR program and over them restricting her reading in such a manner, just letting her roam the bookshelves with no end goal in mind as she used to do, and lots of me reading out loud to her and her little brother. Both kids read challenging stuff for pleasure now.
This was obviously an extreme example, but I think it is fair to note that most current college students were trained in elementary school to always think of reading as something they would be tested on, that there is no such thing as reading solely for pleasure, and that they were actively discouraged from reading things considered to be "too hard." I'm not an expert in early education. However, I cannot help but think this would have negative effects on later willingness to challenge oneself with text, to sink into a text without thought of meeting some metric, or to read more deeply than meeting some short multiple choice test might measure.