How to Read
A different way to do what we were never taught to do in the first place.
Across the Earth today, about 86% of its human inhabitants over the age of fifteen know how to read and write. Basically every young person is taught how to read now, which is quite a marvel given that just 200 years ago, that same figure stood at 12%. Literacy is incredibly powerful, as the ability to read and write opens doors to knowledge and opportunities that are otherwise unavailable for individuals. This comes in addition to the immense benefit literacy provides to society, as it enhances our ability to communicate far beyond what a sole reliance on oral communication permits.
When I think about what it means to “know how to read,” most of us understand it as understanding what words mean and how those words are properly structured for them to make sense together. In our formal reading education, this is usually where our learning how to read stops. After learning the basics of vocabulary and grammar, all of our learning about reading is just adding onto those basics. You learn new words and new ways to put the words together, but it really doesn’t go any further beyond that.
In my estimation, these basics are only one portion of a much larger picture of what it really means to “know how to read.” It disappoints me that these basics are all we typically learn in school about reading, stopping the train long before its destination. Reading goes so much further than words and how they fit together. When we are armed with these basics, we then have to make decisions about how we use them. In schools, our reading education usually goes something like this:
Start with picture books with a few words on each page and an image representing what those words mean so we can build vocabulary and basic grammatical knowledge.
Move to paragraphs, essays, and short stories with fewer pictures and more words per page as we simultaneously are taught more vocabulary, along with how to spell and compose sentences.
Read longer stories and written works, usually accompanied by questions that test how well we understood what we read to build up our reading comprehension skills, in addition to improving our reading skills by having reading be a part of our education in other subject areas like history, science, and mathematics.
After setting these foundations, our education system tends to rinse and repeat — longer and longer written works, broader and broader vocabulary, more and more complex grammatical structures. After completing formal education, most of us stall out in our reading abilities because nobody is requiring us to read competently at higher and higher levels to move on to the next desired step of life.
Why read when nobody is demanding it from you?
That is the central question that drives the next phase of leveling up our reading ability. Now that we know how to do read, we then need to know why we should read and what to do with this ability. In our formal education, we are required to read specific texts. We must read specific stories and books to pass the exams that are necessary to graduate. We must read from start to finish. We can’t skip sections because we can be tested on all the sections. We don’t get much choice at all.
While there are benefits to this approach, I believe that this sets us up to fail at the time when reading gets the most interesting and matters most. Although this requirement-based approach builds a strong, basic foundation of knowledge that we can use as we move forward in our lives, it leaves us with little to no practice for how to choose what to read for ourselves. How could this system teach us to do that when it never trained us to do so? Logically, the most common response is to turn away. We focus so much on the first meaning of “how to read,” which is the actual skill of reading comprehension, and end up missing the second meaning of “how to read,” which goes beyond the skill and moves to the act of showing up and doing the reading itself without abandoning it.
Once we can read, we should be encouraged to use the ability to read to learn about the things that matter to us. We should be actively encouraged to pursue our interests through reading, oftentimes in place of what is currently required. So often, students end up not reading what is required of them in their classes because it is simply not interesting to them at that point in time. They can read, but they do not engage in the act of reading itself. This is a central challenge of education. Why is it not interesting enough to them? One place to look is the framing of the activity. How are the teacher and other influential figures in their lives talking about the value of reading itself or about a given piece of reading material? How do they create intrigue, if at all? How do they connect the dots between what matters to a person in their personal life and the current task at hand?
This kind of interested reading ends up looking very different from the traditional model of reading we learn in school. When we are pursuing our interests, we forage and jump around, following the questions that arise in our minds as we learn more and more. It doesn’t look like picking up a book, reading the introduction, then chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on through the end. We have questions we are trying to answer, so we go look for the answers. If we aren’t finding the answers where we were hoping to find them, we go elsewhere. If we already know what we’re reading, we move ahead to what we don’t know yet so we can actually learn.
Schools don’t really teach us how to do this kind of reading. The closest we get to this is doing research projects, when we collect sources to learn about a topic to then write an essay about it with citations. But even in this task, which deviates from the reading that is required in all our other classes, we are often limited to what our topic of interest can be. We are encouraged to stick to the original question and to not deviate from it so we can complete the project on time. We also are not taught how to organize the information we collect to better understand what we have gathered and synthesize it in a way that would make sense to us and to others. It’s a double-whammy — we’re left to our own devices on the how, the area where we would benefit immensely from extra support, after not getting the autonomy to decide the what and little to no scaffolding to explore the why.
I will return to something I said at the outset of this piece:
Literacy is incredibly powerful, as the ability to read and write opens doors to knowledge and opportunities that are otherwise unavailable for individuals.
This ability does indeed open doors. Nevertheless, our ability to walk through those doors is determined by the further refinement of these abilities, which occurs through their application when pursuing our interests. If you’ve been turned off from reading, I encourage you to try it again, but through the lens I have presented here.
Don’t demand yourself to read from start to finish. Don’t read things that genuinely don’t interest you. If you already know something, feel free to skip it if you don’t want to review it. Identify the questions you’re trying to answer and build answers that you truly believe in your own words from the knowledge you have gathered. I strongly believe it will serve you well.
If you would like to learn more about this topic, I highly recommend reading How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren. It informed much of the practical recommendations I have shared here and my reflections on how we have traditionally learned how to read in schools.
Until next time,
Matt