Chapter One: Michael Bates

The primary focus of “The Elephant in the Room” is the tired litany of complaints about the reasons that students do not develop into lifetime readers. It argues as so many have before that we spend too much time attempting to prepare students for standardized, multiple choice tests and not enough time teaching students to read critically.

There seems to be one fact that the author continues to point to but he also continues to miss the point of its meaning. He repeatedly mentions the fact that students who already read well do well on the tests, and those who do not read well continue to struggle or get worse as we teach to the test. Should not the meaning then be clear that the problem is how do students who read well learn to read well. Is there some mystery that eludes me to the fact that good readers are most likely to become lifetime readers, and they are good readers because they have spent their lives to this point reading for fun?

From my experience both with my own children, and the students that I interview for the Scholars Academy, the most important factor that helped to turn them off of reading for fun was the mind numbing choices made for summer reading assignments. The books were inane and a drudgery. Only the appearance of Harry Potter, and later Twilight saved them from becoming non-readers. Far more important than standardized testing as an explanation of Readicide is the ridiculous works that we make them read. We have even created an entire industry that cranks out thousands of books that require no critical thinking skills to consume them; just a mind that can be inured to the drudgery.

If we want lifetime readers, why not give them a lifetime to decide what to read on their own? The author says that it took him twenty years after high school to become a reader of history again. Was that because he finally had some interest in history, some issue that troubled or excited him that brought him to pick up a serious work of history and begin to read. Only then to discover that other things also interested him and caused him to pick up other works to answer the questions that excited him. Is he somehow worse off because he waited twenty years to ignite that particular flame? During that twenty year period was he busy reading other subjects that interested him? The point seems to me to be that readers are readers and they read what interests them. What we should be focusing on is how do we get kids to want to read.

The answer is to get them to ask questions and then read to seek the answers to those questions. I have an adult (pre-NCLB, and pre-standardized testing mania) son who is an aerospace engineer. At no point in his schooling was there the slightest chance that he would be an avid reader. He was not a words person. He now contacts me to ask for recommendations for works of history to read. Why? Because now in his life he has questions to answer. There are things that he wants to understand that never concerned him before. He is now a lifetime reader because now he enjoys reading and because he is no longer a teenage, high school boy!