Over at Salon, Laura Miller argues that stories don't need morals or messages to be worth reading, and that the whole "reading is good for you" philosophy taps into this weird Puritanical strain in mainstream American culture.
My sense is that this is probably true, although I would argue that books can be fun and meaningful, and that it's perfectly fine to read for pleasure rather than personal growth.
Anyway, here's an excerpt from Miller's piece:
"What is the purpose of reading stories, especially made-up stories? That’s the question lurking behind a recent posting to the New York Times’ education blog, SchoolBook. Ann Stone and Jeff Nichols, the parents of twins, wrote about taking their kids’ third-grade English Language Arts test with some friends as a party game on New Year’s Eve. The group read an inane little story about tiger cubs learning to tear bark off logs, but, to their surprise, couldn’t agree on a single answer to the multiple choice question that followed: 'What is this story mostly about?'
Tests like this, the couple asserts, do students 'a double disservice: first, by inflicting on them such mediocre literature, and second, by training them to read not for pleasure but to discover a predetermined answer to a (let’s not mince words) stupid question.' The problem, they feel, stems from the standardized testing regime, which forces the learning experience into a too-rigid structure. Even a 'banal' story like this tiger-cub number admits 'multiple interpretations,' and the prod to 'reduce the work to a single idea' does a disservice to both reader and text.
I’m sure Stone and Nichols are right that the current, reductive obsession with standardized testing has made this propensity worse, but discomfort with fiction — with all its slippery, non-utilitarian qualities — goes back to the beginning of American culture. As the historian Gillian Avery observed in her 'Behold the Child: American Children and Their Books, 1621-1922,' 17th-century Puritans had big doubts about any kind of non-scriptural storytelling, for adults as well as for children. They were as determined to teach their kids to read as any modern helicopter parent, if for other reasons: For Puritans, reading the Bible was essential to getting into heaven, rather than into Harvard (though to hear some people talk today, you wouldn’t think there was much of a difference)."
Click here to read the whole thing.
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Reading real books (not to be confused with the sad little story mentioned above) whether the books include narrative or non-fiction is the single surest way for the reader to develop comfort with book language. That's the kind of language that good writers use for everything they write. Book language has elaborate sentences that when encountered over time teach readers to be comfortable parsing possible meanings from the kind of elaborate language found everywhere in business, the professions and citizenship. Book language contains words that people don't generally utter in casual conversation, even professional people. The research is also clear that continuous, joyful encounters with book language also casually teaches rich vocabulary better than anything we do in school. People who read a lot are better writers as well. If we can get all that while reading something we personally enjoy, whether it's pulp fiction or the latest editorial, then there really is no downside. Lifelong readers are, by definition, lifelong learners. Lifelong learners have the potential to be lifelong contributors of rich ideas and new perspectives to their families and their communities. If we just keep reading, our ever-enriching education never ends.
