I Watched Bob Ross Too

PBS stopped airing reruns of "Reading Rainbow" a few days ago. One of the columns I read said that PBS wants to concentrate on programs that educate in a substantive way, instead of just encouraging children to read. Why would kids want to read when they can get all their information straight from the television, right?

I once took a stunningly boring class called "Psychology of Reading". It was mostly about the success of phonetic reading as a opposed to whole-word reading. (Even typing that sentence made me sleepy. I promise I won't explain it further.) But before we got into the intricacies of *that*, the professor decided to tease us for a couple days with the actually interesting question of why some kids love to read and some hate it.

My own parents seemed to consciously plan how much I would grow to love reading - I know that it wasn't so deliberate only because I'm the only child and nothing is deliberate with your first and only child, as my mother now says. My father read stories to me at bedtime when I was little - mostly the nauseating Bernstein Bear series that was so popular back then. He didn't care for them, especially as I had only about 15 of them, and made them more interesting for the both of us by adding his own embellishments. The Bernsteins became more like the Simpsons than a bear family that gave sound moral advice. I remember laughing a lot.

My mother, on the other hand, began reading much more difficult books to me from a very early age. She read "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe", "Treasure Island" and a number of others to me before I even went into kindergarten. I remember us both crying when Aslan died.

I was lucky to have a series of good teachers. My 3rd grade teacher read "The Witches" by Roald Dahl to us, and I found a favorite author for my childhood. In 5th grade, we were allowed to read whatever book we wanted to - at least 3 per semester. When we moved to Dallas, I was surprised by the idea of being forced to read just one particular book, but I also was made to read what became my favorite novel, "Jane Eyre". I also had to read "The Scarlet Letter" though - a book I still shudder to think about. The NY Times had an article today about the difference between those approaches.

So is it better to have a list of books every child must read? Or should they have the freedom to choose (within limits)? If I had my way, I never would have touched Nathaniel Hawthorne's yawner or "Snow Falling on Cedars". But I probably wouldn't have read "To Kill A Mockingbird" either. Fair trade? Probably - for me, at least. Looking at the books I've been reading lately next to the resumes I haven't sent out, perhaps the whole thing was a bit *too* successful.