Why Aren't We Reading?

My first book had a glossy cover—a huge, flower-bedecked Easter egg. I loved holding it and turning its pages. That book set me wondering about eggs, their role in creation, and even gestation. It pushed me to want to read.When my sister, almost four years older, was learning to read she used a visual system organized on a child’s easel. Being both curious and competitive, and also drawn to books, I studied that easel and somehow cracked the reading code.By the time I showed up in first grade I was already a reader. I spent that year in the back of the room, drawing and reading alone. I only felt discriminated against when the teacher passed out word cards to the other first graders. I went home to complain to my mother. She had to explain to me that the cards were for the other children to help them learn a new word.I spent much of my childhood burning through books, living in the public library. Neither of my parents finished high school. Both were situational orphans and worked to support themselves from their teens during the Great Depression. Both were smart and dedicated. They were keen for both my sister and me to be properly, wholly educated. Though they could read they were not readers.Early immersion in books, I believe, not just enriched my life and prepared me for academic challenges; the language and the content shaped my thinking, filled out my knowledge base, and shaped my own writing style. Reading to me was like an archeological exploration of worlds hidden inside books.Today reading tends to be taught as a decoding of written words. Content is suppressed in favor of identifying words as they should be spoken. It's like learning to read music and play an instrument without making it sound like music. Not everyone can be taught to love reading. One of my sons was a slow reader and only acquired a now lifelong love of reading when he was taught to read faster, to grasp the narrative flow, to follow and absorb the content. 

"For anyone with a reading disability comprehension becomes critical to academic success. Failure to comprehend on a par with peers also has profound effects on self-esteem."

.Certainly, economic differences often play a significant role in reading ability. Children from affluent families tend to be exposed to a more extensive world; they travel more, they enjoy more varied activities, and they attend more academically accelerated schools. That exposure often translates to reading as an exploratory path. Children from poor families often have not benefited from a quest for new adventures. Unfamiliar content in reading can be for them a daunting challenge with a comparatively constricted vision. The natural curiosity of children will take on a challenge if it presents as one. Dull content or content too familiar and easy to grasp will not stimulate their sense of adventure. Then, of course, there are neurologically based reading impasses. While speech comes naturally to all humans, reading must be learned.  Music, in song or on an instrument, can be played by ear. But decoding a musical score must be learned.Reading inabilities appear in many variations. Dyslexia is a decoding problem. When a dyslexic person attempts to read he or she approaches the aggregation of letters, then the recognition of syllabic partitions, and finally the grasp of entire words and even phrases. All that tends to resist apprehension and understanding. That decoding process proceeds as a struggle. Therapeutic intervention early prevents a dyslexic child from falling further and further behind.Some people are born with a very subtle defect, a failure of eyes to properly—but ever so slightly—converge, to narrow the distance between both eyes during close-up vision. This almost unnoticeable defect can prevent children from enjoying reading, even avoiding it because it may cause headaches. At best it becomes difficult to follow the line of reading as focus is shifting and never easy and secure.Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) presents the problem of attending to the linear flow of lines of text when attention dissolves and also when distractions interrupt reading. People with ADHD can succeed academically but often this requires many attempts at re-reading. acquiring comprehension of a text is the ultimate goal of reading. For anyone with a reading disability comprehension becomes critical to academic success. Failure to comprehend on a par with peers also has profound effects on self-esteem.The apparent shift away from printed text to screen text must compete with other, often more colorful and more quickened visual and spoken media. Will reading cease to be the exploratory adventure that it had become? Will we become illiterate or just differently literate?Meanwhile, I have a book waiting to be read.