Reading what exactly.....

I had the occasion to converse with a man of unusual talent in these parts. I would say that he is possible one of a very few find minds in the region and has made a good accounting of his self through the years. He was holding forth on the virtue of a small library in the area. He held that the library was a good and noble thing. That the locals could be proud of it and the children did benefit greatly by the books that were available.


Then with a rather puzzled look he asked if I thought the reading scores at the local public school were low and could be improved. After an embarrassing pause, I said no I thought the scores were accurate and very good actually. As to improvement, well the children who took the reading test today would be different than the children who take the test in the future so there really was no way of determining improvement. I added that any forcing of the current scores up or down would burden both the children and the teachers unnecessarily.

Oh, yes he stated, but would it not be better if all of the children could read well and those that read well now could work toward reading even better. All of this I found very uncomfortable, because I knew that had my very able friend known how to read himself, he would be less inclined to force the issue with any one else. But then no one can know everything. So, I said that he must not have been familiar with the difficulty of reading.

In his ‘Conversations of Goethe,’ Johann Peter Eckermann quotes the great man writing:

He then joked upon the difficulty of reading, and the presumption of many people, who, without any previous study and preparatory knowledge, would at once read every philosophical and scientific work, as if it were nothing but a romance. “The good people,” continued he, “know not what time and trouble it costs to learn to read. I have been employed for eighteen years on it, and cannot say that I have reached the goal yet.”

As Erik Kuehnelt-Leddihn observed, the requirement that people have general reading and writing skills is unscrupulous because not only is it beyond most, the majority seldom put those skills to any positive use. Given that most books today are written at an elementary reading level there seems to be no reason to stress the poor unfortunates that inhabit the school by ‘improving’ their reading scores. The picture books (aka. Graphic novels) that occupy the largest number of shelves at the local library are perfect for these creatures that are better able to “let things pass through their minds” than would be great novels which would burden them with the ‘time and trouble’ to learn to read.

Since the situation is as it is and there seems that there will be no positive change in the future, it is probably best to leave things as they are.  Otherwise, one may have kicked a sleeping dog and who knows what difficulties may arise from that.  Those who do take the time and trouble will and there is no reason to upset the disposition of those who can not.

SDG