On Producing Brand-new Book Lovers

Abstract

On Producing Brand-new Book Lovers Kemie Nix (bio) Book lovers will occasionally arise from the most adverse circumstances—including schools. Instead of viewing such people as flukes of nature, however, educators tend to regard them as proof that the educational system in the United States works. In fact, the system isn't working very well. While it works well enough to allow most of the children of highly literate parents to enter the ranks of book lovers, it hasn't produced them. Their parents generally deserve the credit, not the educational system. Until ways can be found to produce many brand-new book lovers, the system is essentially a closed one. I believe, however, that ways can be found to produce large numbers of new book lovers, and that teachers of children's literature will lead the way. Without belaboring the poor quality of reading instruction in this country (see Becoming a Nation of Readers: The Report of the Commission on Reading), I see hopeful signs that children's literature is no longer being regarded as peripheral to the serious business of learning to read. No doubt the medicinal nature of reading textbooks and their concomitant "worksheets," as opposed to the joys to be found in reading children's books, influenced the elevation of the former and the decline of the latter. My perspective on the enigmatic relationship between children's literature and reading instruction is perhaps unique. I have been teaching children's literature as an academic subject at the elementary school level for over fifteen years. The school at which I developed a children's literature program is a private school. The program has now been expanded to include two inner-city public schools. Although teaching children's literature to six hundred children at both ends of the economic spectrum leaves little time for reflection, many suppositions and a few convictions have nevertheless emerged from my experiences. Because I have been "feeling my way" through many new—and often chaotic—situations, most of my observations are "hindsight." It is always possible that I have superimposed patterns on the past; patterns have, nevertheless, emerged from the chaos. My children's literature program had its origins in the flexibility accorded classroom teachers in a private school environment. Fully committed to being a classroom teacher, I nevertheless had considerable difficulty deciding which grade level I most wanted to teach. I would teach for a year or two at one grade level and then switch to another. After a decade of teaching, I had taught every grade level except second from kindergarten through sixth. Because children's books and reading instruction have always been my primary interests, this flighty approach to classroom teaching bore unintentional fruit. I developed, not a theoretical, but a practical overview of elementary education in general and of reading instruction in particular. Despite the superior resources of Westminster Schools, the private school at which I was teaching in Atlanta, this overview was not inspiring. Very few elementary students appeared to be reading books with any regularity, let alone with any enthusiasm. In every class that I had taught, there seemed to be only three or four children who were the real readers. Reflecting upon my own elementary education in a public school, I seemed to remember only three or four real readers (labeled "bookworms") in each classroom. A private school with its emphasis upon academic excellence and its select student body should have had many students who could be considered real readers. It didn't. [End Page 131] The students, who couldn't know better, were not the major culprits in ignoring the rewards of literature, however. As far as I could ascertain from courses, conferences, and journals, reading instruction had largely become reductionist. Reading had been reduced to an array of separate reading "skills" to be mastered. To accomplish this, the ubiquitous reading textbooks had absolutely taken over reading instruction, and tradebooks had been shoved aside. In the past, children had been taught decoding skills in order to begin reading tradebooks as soon as possible. At this time, the late sixties and early seventies, children struggled to learn decoding skills out of a textbook; and after...