Once a month, Le Devoir d’enseignement wants offer enriching contributions, whether from researchers and practitioners in the teaching community or from others who have reflected on the state of our education system.
Like the tide, the question of whether students should read literary classics comes up at regular intervals in the news. In an ideal world, I would have no hesitation in answering positively to this question, because reading rich and complex works provides great pleasure, contributes to the development of the individual’s linguistic skills, gives them access to a great deal of knowledge, nourishes his inner life, develops his empathy, which can only help him to put his ideas in order and to deepen his reflections on the world as well as on himself.
But what if in this debate we are all deluding ourselves? And if this controversy surrounding the importance of reading or not reading the classics acted as a sort of veil of Maya placed before our eyes to prevent us from seeing reality – this sad reality which, if we looked at it in the face , would make us understand that most of these young people from secondary school, and even from college or university, are not equipped to read these great works, do not have the vocabulary or general culture, do not master syntax, n have not developed the patience or the level of attention necessary to delve into these great texts in order to appreciate their full richness.
As Michel Desmurget writes in his last and remarkable essay Make them read!” put The Red and the Black by Stendhal, The Skin of Sorrow by Balzac, The Second Sex de Beauvoir or a tribune of World in the hands of a high school student who has read almost nothing up to that point is as rational as offering a xylophone to a penguin.” It is in fact overestimating one’s abilities, taking the risk of further developing one’s detestation for reading and also turning a blind eye to the glaring gaps in our way of introducing these young people to reading, of teaching them to read and to love this intellectual activity which has no equivalent.
Reading is not natural!
“Yes, but writing has never been so present in the lives of young people, they spend their days reading and sending messages to each other on social networks,” some will say. However, what we forget to say – or what we want to ignore – is that what these young people read and write, due to the vocabulary used and the syntax of their “sentences”, is extremely poor. linguistic. To learn to read, you have to read a lot. But the writings that a person chooses to put before their eyes or that they are asked to read at school are not all of the same value. Surfing the Web, reading a lot of text messages or reading comics — graphic novels, as they are now called — do little or nothing to improve reading skills.
Besides, reading is not necessarily understanding. You can be very good at decoding simple words and sentences without being able to understand a slightly more complex text. And this is also what happens to 51.6% of Quebecers who do not reach level 3 of literacy, as André Huberdeau, of the Literacy Foundation, explained in an open letter published in The duty.
In his essay Reader, stay with us!, neuroscience specialist Maryanne Wolf notes that human beings, basically, are not born to read. While language is a natural faculty that only needs to be stimulated by a social environment to flourish, reading, a cultural phenomenon with only 5,000 years of existence, must rely on a reconfiguration of different circuits neural in the potential reader to take shape and consolidate after long years of exercises and efforts — and also frustrations! Learning to read is in itself an odyssey and, like Ulysses, the child needs, to arrive safely, to be guided by various well-intentioned “deities”, following the example of his parents and teachers.
When it comes to academic success, “reading is the universal discipline on which all the others are built,” writes Desmurget judiciously. Learning to read well is undoubtedly one of the best antidotes against failure and dropping out of school. Moreover, several studies show that children who struggle to decode words at the end of primary school will have great difficulty catching up later. Hence the urgency for parents and our education system to take learning to read seriously from early childhood. And the best way to introduce the child to the world of reading is not to put a tablet in his hands as a nanny or to insist on making him learn his alphabet when he is not is only three years old, but more simply to read to him, to read him stories.
When an adult reads to a child, they expose them to a lexicon, to a syntax, to expressions, to turns of phrase that are richer and more complex than those they hear on a daily basis. A climate of authentic exchange is established between the two partners. Attentive, the child understands that the adult is speaking to him, that he is kind towards him. And far from being passive, this activity arouses curiosity, emotion and exchanges on both sides. The child points, asks questions, makes comments and the adult responds, explains, etc. Shared reading, by developing the child’s linguistic and intellectual skills, therefore represents an activity which will later contribute to the child’s learning of writing when he or she enters school. Unfortunately, this activity is too often neglected by overwhelmed parents, unaware of its benefits or downright indifferent.
To make matters worse, those who read to their children often stop doing so too soon. Believing that their offspring have now learned to “read”, they imagine that they will now be able to fend for themselves. In fact, during his first years of school, the child does not learn to read in the strong sense of the term, far from it, but rather to decode a certain number of words placed end to end. It will take him years to understand even the slightest complex text, and even more time to engage in reading that could be described as intensive, deep or immersive; a reading which allows the individual, in front of a book of fiction or a historical story, for example, to put oneself in the place of the other, to understand that the latter has an interior life, to imagine what he feels, to put his own point of view into perspective and then come back to himself transformed by what he has read.
The importance of culture
But to achieve these high levels of reading, to understand a text, two things prove particularly important: the richness and quality of the reader’s language, obviously, but also their intellectual capital, their prior knowledge. In other words, its general culture. As Desmurget writes, “taking into account background knowledge then proves fundamental, to the extent that very few writings are sufficient in themselves.”
In my essay I want to be a slave!I cited this passage borrowed from Metaphysical meditations to illustrate this phenomenon: “Archimedes, to remove the terrestrial globe from its place and transport it to another place, required nothing but a point which was fixed and assured. Thus, I will have the right to entertain high hopes, if I am fortunate enough to find only one thing which is certain and indubitable,” wrote Descartes. To understand this short extract, imagine the amount of “background knowledge” and skills that the reader must call upon: vocabulary, rules of grammar and syntax, notions of history, philosophy, without forgetting the rules regarding the use of analogy that were so often misunderstood by the students I once taught in college.
In fact, if to read you first have to know how to decode the words, to truly understand a text, it is essential to know how to read between the lines, to grasp everything that is implicit in a text, this that alone allows us to achieve a rich general culture which, unfortunately, is too often underestimated and even despised by our education system.
This is all common sense, some will say! However, in this all-digital era, there are many in the world of education who believe that, since all “knowledge” is now accessible with a simple click thanks to Google and the digital cloud – which is false – , it is better to concentrate your energy on developing your critical thinking and creativity instead of overloading your memory with dusty and outdated knowledge… Those who think this way ignore or pretend to ignore that reflection, critical thinking, creativity and obviously deep reading cannot be done in a vacuum, it needs fertile soil, the richest cultural background to take root, to become incarnated in the mind of the individual. To believe the opposite is to condemn young people to remain empty beings who will feed on the spirit of the times to opine, while remaining easy prey for demagogues, fanatics, propaganda, conspiracy theories and falsehoods. news.
To avoid sinking into this worst-case scenario, it is urgent, as Michel Desmurget points out in a somewhat brutal manner, to “roll back the current orgy of recreational screens which shatters intelligence to the point of nausea. of our children”, in order to put books, writing, reading and culture at the center of our educational project.
Suggestions ? Write to Paul Cauchon: [email protected].