Beginning Over, 28. Hard Times for Reading

It's been a rainy midwinter, so far. It hasn't been cold, except yesterday morning, and only because the night before had been so clear that valley fogs formed. It has been a strange vacation, though, because our daughter has taken a job so that she can help pay for the next few months she has left of her vocational course. That means she's not home except for the holidays themselves, since the job is in Santiago, so she stays at a friend's apartment. The job is in a bookstore.

Her main job is to package presents and help out customers. Her coworkers are nice people, but she is amazed at the amount of customers that could very well be labelled "karens." Sometimes because they're rude, other times because they act entitled, others because they treat the store clerks like lackeys. She's surprised at how few people are actually empathetic towards her and the others. 

She's also surprised at how badly children read. Our daughter has always been a reader, and loved books. When she was a baby, I would read her books (translating them directly into English because that's the language I've always used with her), and she would look at the pictures. When she started kindergarten at three, she brought home a book every Friday from the pre-readers section in the school library, and her father would read it to her in Spanish or Galician, depending what language it was in. By the time she was six and in first grade, she had already started reading on her own, and soon graduated to more difficult books. In May of the year she was in first grade, we took her to a book fair, where a children's publishing company had a booth. She browsed the books she could reach and settled on one meant for eight year olds and up. The clerk asked her if she was sure she could read it. She nodded. She was reading it on the way home and finished it soon after. In second grade she started reading the Harry Potter books. Tired of her continuous question, "What does this mean?", I bought her a Spanish language dictionary and taught her how it was set up alphabetically, so she could find the meaning of words new to her. That spring, on our Sunday drives, a Harry Potter book and the dictionary were a constant accessory. 

People have come into the bookstore asking about books they can give a six year old. My daughter has taken care to ask if the child can read well on their own. Always, the answer has been, "Not really". We're almost halfway into the year, and children in first grade haven't learned to read, yet. I've seen it with a first-grader I have this year. The curriculum must have changed, because a second-grader that comes with her did learn to read last year, and they had the same teacher. Others, older, have told me that they hadn't learned the order of the alphabet, when I tried to get them to look up words in a dictionary. 

My daughter has also noticed that older children barely have the patience for reading, and a range of vocabulary that is extremely limited for their age. People have avoided buying any books for teenage children of any greater difficulty than that for a thirteen year old reader. No classics that are in book form are bought, and even the comic version of those classics, when they exist, has heads shaken over the interest they might awaken or not in the recipient. My daughter suggested the comic version of Sophie's World, a classic for adolescents, to one customer looking for something for a teenager. The customer said that she didn't think the child would like it or even be able to read it so they could understand it.  

That the curriculum be changed to take in the overall abilities of children, is good. But the bare basic of learning to read is intrinsic to education. There are children who are ready to read when they are four, others when they're six, and still others when they're older. Education should be focused on letting them learn when they're ready. If a child takes longer to be ready, then perhaps they have a problem that needs to be addressed. But the lowest common denominator shouldn't apply to all. 

Not that in my daughter's obligatory school years it was much better, either. I remember reading classics of English literature in high school. I also remember reading classics by Pedro Calderón de la Barca and Tirso de Molino, both Spanish Golden Age writers, for my Spanish language classes. One would think that, like we had to read Shakespeare, Spanish kids would also have to read these authors, as well as others. No. My daughter only read Spanish classics because she became interested in them, not because they were part of the curriculum. There is no obligatory reading here. In fact, in our region, most high school students only have to read three or four books per year for school. None of them are timeless classics, and some of them are expository nightmares that bore the life out of them. 

Whether or not a kid likes to read, they should be exposed to authors who have written about the human condition. There were books I liked when I had to read them, and others that I do not comprehend why they are considered classics. (Moby Dick is one of the most boring books about a man obsessed with a fish that bit off his leg just to defend itself. Leave the fish alone and stop boring us!) But, at least I was exposed to them and formed my own ideas about their message (or lack thereof). Spanish kids don't have that opportunity. 

Minister of Education, our futures are in your hands. Do better.

Life continues.