how Schools Trained Us To Hate Reading
It’s common to fall out of love with reading. We can all remember when we loved reading a novel during recess in primary school. But when high school bombarded us with what we should and shouldn’t do when we read, we learned to resent books. It made us feel inadequate as young readers. It made us question whether the books we read as kids were silly. The stifling reading environment associated reading with drudgery and killed original ideas in the name of a good mark. Overtime books inspire no joy but fear. Reading novels turns into collecting quotes for a good essay.
For most people, this fear of books extends into adulthood. The feeling of inadequacy convinces them that they shouldn’t bother to read at all. They reactively dismiss books while also missing out on what books are supposed to inspire: hope, illumination, ideas and, most importantly, love.
Let us examine the idea of love concerning books. Nowadays, in the age of Big Data, getting the gist of a book without loving it is possible. It is also possible to analyse a work without experiencing it. Yet true love for books reveals itself in a disorienting haze after reading hours, looking up at a world that’s no longer the same. This is what Alain Badiou defined as an event. Byung-Chul Han explained the event in The Agony of Eros:
The “event” is a moment of “truth”; it introduces a new and entirely different way of being into the habit of the habiter, the situation at hand… It interrupts the Same in favour of the Other.”
When we fall in love with reading, the Sameness of our day-to-day is interrupted. Stories evoke emotions we don’t normally feel among people we don’t normally meet. It liberates us from the repetition of daily life and creates space for us to rejuvenate. According to Aristotle, a good life results from scholē, a Greek word denoting leisure and free contemplative time. It is a state of freedom without coercion or necessitation. And it is no coincidence that this leisure is closely linked to a personal education. In short, good books create open spaces for us to wonder without the coercion of the necessities of life. It allows us to encounter other perspectives beyond our repetitive worries.
Yet ironically, the modern offsprings of scholē turn into schools that do everything possible to eliminate leisure. There is no space for wonder as literature withers into essays that follow a structure, arguments that follow a rubric and thoughts that are repetitive. The love for reading is effectively eliminated in favour of accelerating productivity. We no longer experience books in the schooling environment. Intellectual adventures turn into intellectual labour.
If we ever want to break free of this spell, we must learn to respect literature's power again. To respect a book is to stop viewing it as something that must be grasped, mastered and understood with little time. Literature should be treated as the Other that can potentially interrupt the Sameness of our everyday. But for that potential to flourish, we must create space to read a book without an ulterior motive. Immanuel Kant called this goalless reading a kind of intellectual luxury. Unlike mere calculation, he recognised that innovative thinking cannot be accelerated at will. It often moves in roundabout ways. It’s adventurous and inspires love instead of dread. And often, our arrogant need to control this free-spirited thinking gives way to dread, monotony and repetition.
