I heard from a number of you when I approached the complex subject of “what” our children should be reading and intend to continue probing it. For the home educating parent, reading is undeniably crucial. Beyond the challenge of our children accomplishing the actual skill of reading the written word, there is that immense ocean of written material–making choices about which books to read is for many of us an overwhelming undertaking. I touched on the importance of books as the means of conveying knowledge, as Charlotte Mason said, “We read to know,” our responsibility to put our children in the way of great literature so they get in touch with great ideas to feed their naturally curious and active minds, and how our all-too-often inadequate background in great literature ourselves contributes to our feelings of inadequacy and faltering hesitancy to do so. This was revealed in that common reflection I hear: “Well, at least they’re reading, right?”

Whether easily or laboriously, we do manage to get them reading. This is important. Reading, after all, is not a naturally acquired skill as are eating, walking, talking, or climbing trees. Once learned, it is simply useful for survival in our culture, to read signs, directions, and instructions. However, the art of reading well, whether for formal lessons or leisure enjoyment is an entirely different skill. It is an art. How well we develop this art is my concern today.

There is a vast difference between passing our eyes over a page of words to pass the time and submerging our mind in intriguing and challenging ideas. In the house of literature, there are a thousand rooms on every level. No one disputes that there is a difference between reading for fun and reading for instruction, but what  is fun to read is also an acquired habit. It is possible that our children’s leisure reading could be of higher caliber than it is. For example, I recently read an article by a gentleman who confessed to being a reluctant reader. He loved having his mother read aloud to him and really didn’t want to have to do it for himself.  When she made it clear it was time and he had no choice, she handed him three sets of books to begin with: the complete works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, and Sir Walter Scott. He was seven years old. The choice of literature did not hinder him at all since these were the works he had been hearing for years and was completely comfortable with. You may remember that Charlotte Mason also cut her  reading teeth on Defoe and Scott. Do you think we’ve slipped just a bit in what we expect of our children?

Mark Twain in typical caustic fashion, once bluntly said, “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them at all.” Ouch.

Another beloved and respected author had this to say on the subject at hand:

“Long before the bane of television invaded our every waking moment, most people in modern industrialized cultures were at least marginally able to read. They just don’t. The majority, though they are sometimes frequent readers, do not set much store by reading. They turn to it as a last resource; they abandon it with alacrity as soon as any alternative pastime comes up. It’s kept for railway journeys, illnesses, odd moments of enforced solitude, or for that process lamentably called “reading oneself to sleep.” They sometimes combine it with desultory conversation, often with listening to the radio.

“But literary people are always looking for leisure and silence in which to read and do so with their whole attention. When they are denied such attention for undisturbed reading, even for a few days, they feel starved, impoverished…There is a profound puzzlement on the part of the mass of the citizenry over the tastes and the habits of the literate. It is pretty clear that the majority, if they spoke without passion and were fully articulate, would not accuse us of liking the wrong books, but of making such a fuss about books at all. We treat as a main ingredient in our well-beings something which to them is marginal. Hence, to say simply that they like one thing and we like another is to leave out nearly the whole of the facts.

“All this is not to imply any hint of moral interpretation on the part of modern bohemianism, but rather, it is to recognize the simple reality of the gaping chasm that exists between those who read and those who do not.” (C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism)