International Literacy Day was observed on Thursday.
The call went out to Barbadians to engage in 15 minutes of what was styled Drop Everything And Read.
The Barbados Government Information Service release stated: “The Ministry of Education and Human Resource Development has issued a challenge to Barbados to Drop Everything And Read.
“Government departments, private sector entities and business and learning institutions will be encouraged to permit staff and/or students to read for pleasure – a book, magazine or journal for pleasure – for about 15 minutes, beginning at 1 p.m. . . .”
We endorse the initiative, even if it was little more than symbolic, but we fear that these days large numbers of Barbadians will not drop everything and read.
We know that television has drawn away lots of people from the more disciplined attention that reading requires.
Also, because it has become an obsession, music has consumed hours of blinkered single-minded interest.
And then there is the Internet. Some will say that this is reading but it is hard to equate this popular instant coffee, flitting flirtation with the printed word with the intense involvement with continuous prose that we have long associated with the act of reading.
For some time we have been acquainted with sound bites. Most people’s engagement of the Internet is a taking of print bites (perhaps more properly “print bytes”).
Ironically, the school system, with its lack of emphasis on the personal stake of the reader, is probably also conducing to less long-term reading, having apparently not grasped its greater responsibility in light of the stiff competition from other sources.
Reading is, above all else, a personal quest. But such is the focus on skill development in schools that that often becomes an end in itself.
When teachers use a narrative, an exposition, an argument for the sole purpose of, for instance, developing comprehension skills, most students will not, through that avenue, develop any personal interest in reading.
The skills, though very important, are not the end point.
The end point is personal engagement of the story, of the information, of the point of view expressed. Put differently, the text is to be engaged as part of a personal adventure. When this is missing, even though students may very well develop reading skills, only the most ardent will develop a love for reading.
In addition, reading at secondary school level becomes “literature”, and books are supposedly chosen for their potential to deliver profound insights.
But this emphasis on “literature”, though well intentioned, treats the book as subject matter rather than personal pursuit, and thereby constricts what it means to read. So hundreds of students are “taught” the books and pass the exams – and most thereafter voluntarily read little else and certainly nothing like what they “studied”. How has the love for reading been nurtured?
If a piece of writing is given to a student, not as a living text of experience or ideas or information to be personally engaged, but merely as something to be comprehended, to be “appreciated”, to be grappled with in a one-size-fits-all exploration of themes and symbols and character qualities and such – and not as something that is a vibrant part of their life adventure – why should they develop the habit of engaging texts?
There is clearly a reading aversion developing here.
Many Barbadians are aliterate – they have the ability to read but don’t. And the school system may have unwittingly contributed to it.
