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We are failing our young minds
My experience:
Even though I had always loved reading and continue to read like I get paid for it (I don’t), I recently realized that that love did not come from my many years of studying books at school; quite the opposite actually. I fell in love with reading from the books I read outside of formal education. The Harry Potter books that I read multiple times over. The Twilight books (what a core memory) devoured in one sitting. Or the Darren Shan series that I created a library card for. My memories of what I read in school for English are pretty non existent, and for what I can remember, the emotion attached to them is one of boredom.
Of course we read the classics like The Tempest and Of Mice and Men and whilst they are, obviously, classics for a reason, as a teenager, they didn’t really ignite anything in me. I saw them as a source of coursework: laborious and mundane. For the contemporary picks, I remember reading random books that, yet again, I found so unbelievably boring. I only have one positive memory of reading at school; my Year 6 teacher reading a few pages of George Orwell’s Animal Farm to us every day before home time. I still remember the concentration with which I would listen, my teacher’s added commentary explaining what she was reading, and the boy…
