A Yorkshire Post posting says that, "One-in-eight teachers has never read a book to their class ..." according to a research. (From some of the horror stories I hear of Malaysian schools, a local research might indicate that only one-in-eight teacher actually read.) The gripe is that "almost 600,000 children could be missing out on great stories and failing to develop a love of reading because of the use of 'extracts' in the classroom ..." highlighting fears amongst teachers and parents that this is affecting pupil's academic performance. I guess we have no such worries -- most of our parents and teachers will be quite happy if their children didn't read anything as long as they score 21 As.Not surprisingly, this has spawned a major debate. One favourite view is: "If computers/playstations/DS etc, etc, didn't exist, children would spend more time reading. This generation has much more distractions than we had as kids - there was nothing much on the tv when I was little ..." Of course, it is fashionable to blame it all on the techno distractions of the day. When I was a kid, we had none of those either -- we did all our gaming outdoors. But that didn't stop teachers from reading to us, or for us to read on our own.
Basically, what we are looking at is the failure of the education system (despite, or because of, new fangled ideas) and teachers. (Actually, we had very few good teachers in those days either -- however much we like to romanticise the past. So, basically, nothing much has changed.)
The study was commissioned Heinemann.
Yorkshire Post
