The final post for 2024 is a thought-provoking piece from regular contributor, Lyndon Riggall, highlights the importance of regular sustained reading. Lyndon provides a compelling impetuous to set some goals for personal reading practices and to encourage the youngsters in our lives to build healthy and sustained reading habits.
In a recent article that has been doing the rounds online, titled simply The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books, Rose Horowitch (2024) outlines an ongoing crisis in higher education: even in top-tier university English Departments, students are arriving not only unprepared for a standard reading load of a book a week, but also sometimes having never read a full-length novel from cover-to-cover at all. She notes: “In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.” Horowitch points to an EdWeek Research Center Survey by Stephen Sawchuk (2024) of third-to-eighth-grade educators in which only 17 percent said that they “primarily teach whole texts.” The knock-on effect of this is that students reach a point where even a short novel can feel like an insurmountable hurdle in a world of rapid-fire information dispensed in bright, bite-sized chunks. When I was a primary school student, my Grade 6 teacher called the first half an hour or so after lunch “SQUIRT”: “Sustained, Quiet, Uninterrupted, Individual Reading Time.” What a privilege that feels like in 2024… perhaps even an impossibility.
As the Department for Education, Children and Young People here in Tasmania continues its focus on literacy and reading across the school years, I had the fortune to attend a recent full-day workshop with reading expert Emina McLean, who discussed the science of reading with an eye to the specific strategies that are most effective in developing this skill. At the heart of her work is the skill of fluency: being able to read a text out loud, clearly, accurately and with expression. There is certainly no denying that the complex processes of unpacking words, tone and meaning are neither easy nor simple, but if we can achieve them—and even sustain them—then certainty of our reading level follows. It starts early, and, if we are successful, that journey that never ends, and whole texts are a large part of it.
Earlier this week I saw a TikTok video making fun of the typical middle-school literary canon of books and their absurd titles like Biffs, Barfs and my Big Brother’s Farts, The Too-Cool-For-School Ultimate Guide to Pranks or Don’t Read This Unless You Want to be Scared! While I have concerns about what it means for the state of publishing that there are so many books that are easily marketable, in general I’m a supporter of the idea that almost all reading is good reading. Ideas, certainly, can be dangerous, but I’ve never been particularly afraid of heavily franchised books like those connected to the films of Disney or videogames like Minecraft. As we grow up, all stories qualify as lessons in the power of writing for good and evil. And if what we read makes us laugh, or makes us afraid, or makes us blush, why should there be any shame in enjoying a narrative for what it is?
It is unfathomable to me that we might live in a world where an English Major at any university cannot read a novel. Reading, in my experience, is the gateway to all of the ideas of the world, but the progress of Tasmania’s dreams of literacy will never be possible without a focus on the skill of sustained focus. Listening recently on Radio National to an interview with American psychologist Jonathan Haidt, I was struck by his overwhelming enthusiasm for the government’s recent announcement of a social media ban for young people under the age of sixteen. I have had my concerns about the ban (primarily due to its potential to push the online behaviour of children away from their family’s notice and into private spaces on the fringes), but it seems hard to argue that social media isn’t dangerous when most of the adults that I’ve spoken to feel that their own ability to focus has been significantly diminished—at least in some part—by it.
Whenever I look at the “Screen Time” section of my iPhone, I find myself baffled by the fact that I can so easily use my device for three hours a day or more while barely noticing. An hour reading some fiction before bed in comparison to an hour spent scrolling social media can make me feel like an entirely different person in the morning, and I have to remind myself of this regularly, yet I was born before the era of the smartphone. How can we possibly imagine what life could be like with less addiction to technology if we have never seen it?
As we head towards Christmas and the summer holidays, now seems like as good a time as any to think about how we spend those precious snatches of free time. The “Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” are the evolution of “The Children Who Don’t Read Books.” For all of our strategies, there is nothing to my mind that will be more effective to building fluency, understanding and knowledge than simply reading—as actively, widely and frequently as possible.
Margaret Atwood once said that “a word after a word after a word is power.” What a gift to be able to harness that power, and what a tragedy when we can’t.
It’s a huge mission, but with a simple beginning:
The first turn of a page…
Lyndon Riggall
Lyndon Riggall is a writer, teacher, and co-president of the Tamar Valley Writers Festival. He has written the picture books Becoming Ellie and Tamar the Thief, and is a 2024 Premier’s Reading Challenge Reading Champion. You can find out more about him at www.lyndonriggall.com or on social media @lyndonriggall.
