Across the board, Australians are reading less than ever before, with young men reading the least and older women reading the most.
The trend is reinforced from a young age, with parents more likely to read to their daughters than sons.
Australia Reads, a book industry initiative, is calling for a national strategy that reminds people of the fun and comfort that reading can bring.
For me personally I blame school.
It went from reading in the library for fun to breaking down texts and trying to make-up some deep meaning for a grade. It destroyed the fun of reading and made it a slog, I’ve never recovered the passion since.
Fuck me that might have been me as well. Never even considered that.
Funny how folks are different. I always enjoyed reading stuff and making up the ways it can mean stuff. Like, it’s easy to read Dracula and think about feminism and women’s place in the world. (a foreign entity shows up and now women are abandoning their motherly duties, wandering the streets at night? That won’t do. Get some men to hold her down and penetrate her with this big wood. Hmm.)
I often find the opposite mode, the absolute refusal to think about the story beyond “some things that happened”, tiresome. Like, “Ok I get that the story is about how they have to remove, possibly with violence, the competent women ruler and put the child boy on the throne because the rules say that only a man can rule, but why do you have to make this political? it’s just a fun story.”
I read a lot of fiction books in my own time when I was in primary school for the enjoyment of it.
When I got to highschool I hated English so much. Analyse what the author’s theme was in this bla bla fuck off! Sucked the joy out of reading. Didn’t give me any useful skills for the career path I was heading in to either.
There needs to be an academic English subject for people who just need it to get in to STEM courses.
Took some years after high school to get back in to it, but I do occasionally read fiction when I have time these days.
We had that basically from the first grade of primary school. Each month a new book. It started with just summarizing the text, then gradually went from writing what you think the moral of the story is, to giving a full breakdown and analysis. 12 years of that, for the books I found mind-numbingly boring, that I ended up weaseling/cheatig my way through most of it without even reading. I remember giving my best to try read through the entire Crime and Punishment, but giving up 1/3 into the book. All the classic literature—just not for my brain.
Didn’t help that while my primary school teacher had tried to cultivate my creative writing (45 minute, graded assignment), my secondary school teacher was a snob who graded me lower just because she “didn’t like my style”. God, I hated school, lol.
I still like reading modern fantasy and some other genres, so there’s that, but school almost completely turned me off from reading.
We had to read the Illiad and I gave up after 5 pages. I just cannot be bothered to read when it’s all writen in such weird prose. Achilles being called 3 different names on the first 2 pages. Fuck off with that. And then when we went through it with our teacher she asked what kind of wood Achilles’ ja elin was made of. Like what?? How is that fucking relevant. But I do still to this day know it was aspen (I think that’s the correct translation).
Illiad was in our curriculum, too. But I think the worst I gave a shot to were the few works from my country’s literature several centuries old that literally over half had to be translated to the modern language for us to understand. It was exhausting to read.
Lol, thanks for reminding me of something with the Achilles bit. We have state exams at the end of 12 year education that are also a requirement for college admittance. There are (were?) two levels of difficulty. I took the higher one. But the lower one had an especially egregious question. It was so controversial, it ended in newspapers, was debated among teachers and politicians alike. The question was which color a certain character’s ring was from a book we had as required reading at some point in school. Something, as you can imagine, absolutely irrelevant to test in the final state exams (which test knowledge of the four high school years on multiple subjects).
School systems nowadays suck so much for so many reasons.
Oh yeah our finals also have lower or higher levels. Except for slovene (the main language) which is only on the higher level. And is usually the worst one since Half the grade is a long essay which is of course graded subjectively and there are a lot of parts like pronounciation and other shit which literally cannot be solved 100% correctly since you would have to know the whole dictionary.
Howdy, neighbor 😁 Matura is such a joke, lol.
Quite right.
You’re certainly right that the way I did it in school felt rather performative and didn’t leave me with positive impressions of the books I had not read previously. I’m not going to say there’s no purpose in trying to understand the meanings/symbolism in a work but it’s not going to make a good impression on someone if that’s their first introduction to the book - or worse their introduction to reading books in general.
I know it’s almost exclusively negative experiences here, but I do think it depends heavily on the student and their teachers as to whether that type of coursework is appealing. Personally I devoured English throughout high school, it was my favourite subject by far and the only one in Year 12 where I felt empowered, confident and challenged myself. It really established my ability to think deeply about complex issues and articulate my arguments with more clarity (and listen to and engage with those of others), which are some of the most widely applicable and useful life skills I learned in school.
I can report something similar; the last several years of high school, literature class is just miserable shit written hundreds of years ago that seems to be deemed important because the limp dick grey hairs in charge of writing the state curriculum were forced to read it when they were in school, and they were taught not to question their elders so you WILL fucking study this.
Anyone who goes back in time to kill Hitler, could you get Emily Bronte as well?