Reading has been turned by schools into passing exams, looking for details and finding digested, programmed ideas. In the highly programmed and behaviorist controlled classroom, the reader cannot answer the larger questions and possibilities posed and presented by an all encompassing reading
Reading has been turned by schools into passing exams, looking for details and finding digested, programmed ideas. In the highly programmed and behaviorist controlled classroom, the reader cannot answer the larger questions and possibilities posed and presented by an all encompassing reading experience. Within the context of contemporary reductive curricula, what is possible with the printed page – which also includes, nowadays, the screen, visual arts, even graffiti - is limited by the bureaucratization and industrialization of knowledge (Carini, 1987).
The personal as well as collective reading experience goes beyond simply meeting immediate objectives or mastering taxonomic skills and ideas. Those who argue in favor of basic skills or specific principles and standards fail to realize that we haven't stopped teaching basic skills or delineate standards. What schools have stopped teaching is the pleasure of reading.
In a rather schematic history of USA education, it can be argued that the early stages of the reduction of the reading experience into delineated skills and pre-digested ideas began during the early part of the twentieth century. It was the start of the dependency on standardized testing, behaviorist theories and its related programmed education and texts.
Luckily, this rigid approach to the reading experience is being counterattacked and transformed from the outside of the schooling institution. It’s being challenged by the new reading mechanism, medium: the computer and its