Can We Inspire a Love of Reading?

Or can we just make sure our students learn to read?

What’s Love Got to Do with It?

Sarah Oberle (researchED Delaware lead) recently posted her favorite compliment from a student:

You stand up for everybody.

Here’s mine:

You changed my life—you made me become a reader.

Note that my student said become a reader, not love reading. He has struggled mightily over the past two years to crack the code, burdened by numerous personal and instructional challenges. But now, at the end of second grade, his life has stabilized enough to allow him to learn. He’s cracked the code and recognized that the code is his key to unlocking reading. His awareness of how this decoding thing works and how he can make it work for him has made all the difference. His life has now changed and he knows it.

The following quote, embraced by many Balanced Literacy proponents, is attributed to literacy consultant Donalyn Miller, author of The Book Whisperer (2009). She says:

Our job is to teach the child, not the book. We want to inspire a lifelong love of reading.

My response:

Our job is to teach the child how to read the book and hope they apply their skills throughout their schooling and beyond to any written material they encounter.

Here’s what some Whole Language and Balanced Literacy advocates have backwards: They often claim that every child learns to read differently but also contend that there is enough uniformity within our students for us to be able to inspire a lifelong love of reading in all of them.

In fact, both of these propositions are problematic. Stanislas Dehaene discusses the first in How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now (2021). He states:

All readers learn to connect symbols with sounds and meanings in highly similar ways, because of how the brain is wired . . . Whole-word or discovery-based methods ignore the constraints of how the brain actually learns written language.

Connecting symbols with sounds and meanings is non-negotiable as Claude Goldenberg emphasizes:

Although there is much more to reading than letters and sounds, they are central, even non‑negotiable, to reading and recognizing words. Reading and recognizing printed words accurately, automatically, and efficiently—not simply decoding—are essential for successful reading development.

However, what is negotiable are the books we offer our students: those that we read as a class throughout the year (complex, grade-level literature) as well as those we have available in our classroom libraries. And these choices can facilitate a love of reading while still falling short of making it a reality.

If we want to stimulate a student’s positive relationship with reading—how they feel about it and whether they love it—we have some roadblocks to overcome because developing desire is a lot more subjective than developing skills, and therefore highly variable. Yes, we immerse our students in authentic literature and attempt to inspire them to become lifelong readers, but this is secondary to the primary goal of something far more objective: giving them the tools to access print at any age. If love blossoms en route, so much the better—and we celebrate it without automatically anticipating it.

This may be a personal rather than universal failing, but I'm pretty sure I've never actually fostered a love of reading in any student I’ve taught K-12 who wasn’t already destined to become a lifelong reader. What I have done is taught kids how to read and guided them towards loving the book we're reading as a class or the ones they’ve chosen on their own. However, I’m convinced that the personalities that drive personal interests play a far bigger role in a student’s relationship with reading than my inspiration does.

In Maryanne Wolf’s Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (2019), she shares her experience trying to reread a beloved book, Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. To her dismay, she discovered that her post-internet inability to focus was interfering with her concentration, like having molasses poured over her brain.

However, even pre-internet I always had a hard time getting into Hesse, so for many of us—including many of our students—it can be personal interest shaping our reading experiences rather than internet habits. Of course, it’s difficult to deny (and I don’t!) Wolf’s assertion that superficial reading characterized by spurts of searching and scrolling rather than sustained concentration can severely impact our ability to slow down and focus, which is necessary for understanding well-constructed sentences as well as well-developed features of the whole text. A colleague teaching Romeo and Juliet to his freshmen had such a difficult time gaining any traction with the text that after the marriage scene, he snapped shut the book, scanned the class, and cheerfully announced that they lived happily ever after.

My own ninth grade English teacher casually remarked mid-lesson one day that every girl should read Jane Eyre, Gone with the Wind, The Return of the Native, and Wuthering Heights. Forgetting about an affront to feminism in singling out love stories just for girls, these were in fact excellent recommendations. I loved Jane Eyre and Gone with the Wind (both several hundred pages longer than your average book) and enjoyed The Return of the Native. But I simply couldn’t finish Wuthering Heights, and to this day—despite several attempts—have been unable to do so. Disinterest is not so easily dismissed.

Reading both Judith Rich Harris’s book The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do (1998) and Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002) opened my eyes to a possible reason behind my adolescent reading experiences. Children aren’t as malleable as we may think (or hope) they are, and attempting to inspire a love of reading must yield to personalities that dictate preferences. Any mismatch between my students’ interests and the material I’m teaching could instill a reluctance to read or foster flat out resistance to reading. Pinker states:

The effects of parents on their children’s personalities are not only smaller than most people think, they are smaller than most psychologists think, and often barely detectable.

What about the effects of teachers on their students’ personalities? Even smaller.

Leave it to an economist to put it bluntly. From Bryan Caplan:

And contrary to teachers’ fantasies about changing their students’ lives, learning is highly specific. Practicing X makes you better at X—and little else. Furthermore, the effects of environmental intervention erode over time—that’s fade-out for you.

Blank Slates or Blank Stares?

I can’t remember who introduced me to the following four criteria to look for in a book, but they are definitely ones that apply to the great books I’ve read.

• Complex Characters

• Universal Themes

• Aesthetic Language

• Compelling Plot

Unfortunately, it’s compelling plot that we sometimes give short shrift to in our pursuit of appreciating great literature. Like the horse to water, we can lead our students to literature, but we can’t make them love it. And that’s okay. Children are not blank slates when it comes to desires. Unlike their ‘blank’ brains that will not read until they are rewired through the process of connecting letters with sounds, their hearts are not blank. Carson McCullers tells us that the heart is a lonely hunter. It may be lonely, but it’s also very likely to have a fairly good idea of what it’s looking for that it finds fulfilling. If we succeed in the primary goal of turning out proficient readers, can we leave love out of the equation and take overall literacy rather than love of literature (or even just reading) as the desired outcome?

My two children offer a good illustration of this point. My younger son has a broad reading palette, reads widely, and appreciates writers as diverse as Evelyn Waugh and Percival Everett. By contrast, my older son is far more selective but has appreciated most of his required reading at school—books like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Huckleberry Finn, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and The Great Gatsby—simply because, he points out, “stuff happens” in those books. A book with a plot that compels can propel the reader forward to its eagerly-anticipated conclusion, and he is unforgiving towards books that he believes don’t move. He wouldn’t say he has a lifelong love of reading—but he would definitely say he knows what he likes, and if you hand him books like Reginald Hill’s The Woodcutter, he would love them every bit as much as that one. He has set a higher bar than his brother and allows a “love” of other activities to compete with reading when it comes to how he allocates his time.

Romance and Reality

How did romantic notions of reading supplant the hard yards (to borrow that wonderful phrase from Bronwyn Ryrie Jones) of teaching students to read? In the rush to foster a love of reading, some Balanced Literacy teachers have left students behind by leaving out some core elements of reading instruction. They fail to balance the perceived dry details of decoding with the exciting world of real reading somewhere over the rainbow.

Just this week, one of my second graders had to wade through the ‘ea’ in the title of a story about inventions—Dreaming of Great Ideas—and she fought off exasperation as she nimbly applied flexible pronunciations three times in a row to arrive at three words in her oral vocabulary. She could feel proud of her success but also dejected that, as an English Learner, she faces hurdles that impede her fluency, and she just can’t leap-frog skill-building if she’s to have any chance at all of loving reading.

Anything that smacks of drudgery—like mastering phonics—might deter us from becoming a lifelong reader, these Balanced Literacy teachers theorize; hence, their avoidance behaviors when it comes to systematic and explicit instruction of foundational skills. Why not, they imply, simply dismiss the drudge of decoding and rush headlong into making meaning? Of course, the sad irony is that in our haste to pave the path to loving reading, we risk wasting the window of opportunity to teach kids how to lift off the pages the very words we want them to love. And that’s the tragedy of a reading trajectory governed by romance rather than reality.

So if I settle for the less lofty but far more impactful goal of making my students competent readers rather than leading them to love literature—and aim to give them enough reading experiences to understand how the books they are interested in can deliver the goods when it comes to time well-spent—then that’s good enough for me. Because frankly, I don’t have a choice when it comes to making kids love reading if they just plain don’t. My high-mindedness as a highfalutin English teacher can’t override the respect my students demand for their reading preferences. I learned long ago to bow to Tina Turner’s wisdom: What’s love got to do with it?

A Bridge Too Far

After listening to the Booker Prize winner The Sense of an Ending, I immediately went back and started listening all over again to follow the breadcrumbs that led to the ending. That's a compulsion you just can't teach. But extrapolating my experiences to those of my students and attempting to replicate them class-wide is a fool’s errand. Less lofty but more manageable goals—like teaching our students to become proficient readers—can reduce stress in the classroom for teacher and student alike. I can aim high but not agonize when I fall short.

Returning to Maryanne Wolf’s very real concerns about how internet reading is changing our brains, I’m reminded of a Dick Van Dyke Show episode from five decades earlier. If you watch for two minutes at 7:00 you’ll see Rob and Laura at a hoity toity literary event which can represent our students receiving instruction in classic literature. They are introduced to the self-important anti-existentialist Yale, whom Rob later refers to as Mushmouth. Here’s the mush out of Yale’s mouth where he echoes—in far more convoluted language than Maryanne Wolf’s—her thesis about our slow descent into brain atrophy. He is concerned that:

A plethora of the mundane—a blithering mundane—is inculcating itself and sweeping in the world of conformity . . . with this osmotic process and a capillary infusion of the brain . . . and these processes are deleteriously coming in, and the osmotic processes in the brain will atrophy, and nothing more than a vestige will remain.

So is it up to us teachers to ward off this bad stuff from happening to our students’ brains by giving them focused, intentional instruction with books worth reading? We do need to give them this instruction, but guaranteeing that it can either combat brain atrophy or develop a lifelong love of reading is beyond our pay grade, and I refuse to accept the blame for a failure to do either.

How many times must I have sounded like Mushmouth to my high school students, droning on, for example, about the brilliance of this near perfect prose from Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, a line etched in my memory.

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and the presumption that once our eyes watered.

Decades after the National Reading Panel report, we are still crossing the same war-ravaged reading bridges because we keep burning them behind us with little to show for our progress except a persistent memory of the research conducted in the world we’ve crossed over from, still struggling to see through the smoke of romantic notions impeding its implementation.

There is so much we need to do. We have got to do a better job teaching beginning reading, building knowledge, and bridging reading with writing. These challenges must take precedence over inspiring a lifelong love of reading, as admirable as that goal may be. It is essential that we set aside our differences, set our priorities straight, and see to it that proficient reading prevails.

You can't teach kids to love reading. You can only teach them how to read well enough so they can discover for themselves if they love doing it. Either way, the skill that develops will last a lifetime. What more do our students expect from us? And what more can we reasonably ask of them?

Always striving to make sense—please let me know when I fail.