How to Create Nonreaders - (repost Pt1)

I recently came across this article by Alfie Kohn (How to Create Nonreaders). Wow, it is so refreshing to read an article that isn't 'noise' - an article that states the bleeding obvious, yet an 'obvious' rarely stated, an 'obvious' that flies in the face of an accepted norm of 'epidemic' proportions.

I'll pull out a couple of punch-packing paragraphs to give you a taste. For starters, check out this one on motivation:

In fact, it’s not really possible to motivate anyone, except perhaps yourself. If you have enough power, sure, you can make people, including students, do things. That’s what rewards (e.g., grades) and punishments (e.g., grades) are for. But you can’t make them do those things well — “You can command writing, but you can’t command good writing,” as Donald Murray once remarked — and you can’t make them want to do those things. The more you rely on coercion and extrinsic inducements, as a matter of fact, the less interest students are likely to have in whatever they were induced to do.

What?? ... 'The more you rely on coercion and extrinsic inducements, as a matter of fact, the less interest students are likely to have in whatever they were induced to do.' Isn't this the essence of the education system we find ourselves in? Coercion and extrinsic inducements? Make them do the work? Dangle a carrot - namely 'grades' - and then they will learn? As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about student engagement and the nature of 'genuine learning', the paragraph above provides a key to, and a reason for, the lack of intrinsic desire in students to learn.

Kohn continues ...

What a teacher can do – all a teacher can do – is work with students to create a classroom culture, a climate, a curriculum that will nourish and sustain the fundamental inclinations that everyone starts out with: to make sense of oneself and the world, to become increasingly competent at tasks that are regarded as consequential, to connect with (and express oneself to) other people. Motivation – at least intrinsic motivation — is something to be supported, or if necessary revived. It’s not something we can instill in students by acting on them in a certain way. You can tap their motivation, in other words, but you can’t “motivate them.” And if you think this distinction is merely semantic, then I’m afraid we disagree.

On the other hand, what teachers clearly have the ability to do with respect to students’ motivation is kill it.[1] That’s not just a theoretical possibility; it’s taking place right this minute in too many classrooms to count. So, still mindful of the imperative to “write the other way,” I’d like to be more specific about how a perversely inclined teacher might effectively destroy students’ interest in reading and writing. I’ll offer six suggestions without taking a breath, and then linger on the seventh ...

We teachers most certainly possess the ability to kill student motivation. I've done it many a time. But to quote Monty Python "I got better!" In fact, over 20+ years my sole motivation for improving as a teacher was to stop boring the pants off my students. The lack of light shining behind the eyes of bored students, most of whom had a glowing potential to be engaged, was torture for a teacher with high ambition.

But now the 'fun' begins. Killing the joy of reading. Just the first of seven methods proposed by Kohn, and a mention of another four.

1. Quantify their reading assignments.  Nothing contributes to a student’s interest in (and proficiency at) reading more than the opportunity to read books that he or she has chosen. But it’s easy to undermine the benefits of free reading. All you need to do is stipulate that students must read a certain number of pages, or for a certain number of minutes, each evening. When they’re told how much to read, they tend to just “turn the pages” and “read to an assigned page number and stop,” says Christopher Ward Ellsasser, a California high school teacher.[2] And when they’re told how long to read – a practice more common with teachers of younger students — the results are not much better. As Julie King, a parent, reports, “Our children are now expected to read 20 minutes a night, and record such on their homework sheet. What parents are discovering (surprise) is that those kids who used to sit down and read for pleasure — the kids who would get lost in a book and have to be told to put it down to eat/play/whatever — are now setting the timer…and stopping when the timer dings. . . . Reading has become a chore, like brushing your teeth.”

Now I'm no reading expert but I love reading and I love watching my daughter blossom through her love of reading. I have done since we started reading to her at age 3 weeks. And I know for a fact that the percentage of the population who do not possess a pleasure default for reading is a number vastly higher than it should be. Has the system, in its desire to turn children into good readers, been way too prescriptive, way to systemised, way too teacher directed, thereby killing any chance for a love of learning to be instilled in the majority?

So to finish off ... four more 'guaranteed' methods for killing reading (and writing) ...

2. Make them write reports. 

4. Focus on skills.

6. Prepare them for tests. 

7. Restrict their choices.

Oh boy!! How many reading programs around the planet do this?

Fell free to check out the second and third instalments in this series. Or check out the full article if you dare.