THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 1, 1996 TAG: 9609030212
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: 76 lines
One compelling argument for encouraging young people to read is that it can make them less murderous.
High school English teacher Mary Leonhardt, veteran of a quarter-century in classrooms public and private, believes that avid readers are almost never violent children.
Think about it.
How many bookworms have you ever observed bullying anybody?
``Kids can read war books and horror books and science-fiction thrillers,'' she maintains, ``and still be gentle, peace-loving students.''
That's in spite of the research that shows a relationship between the TV and movie violence children absorb and the violence they act out.
``The crucial difference,'' Leonhardt argues, ``is that when we watch a movie, we are outside the minds of both perpetrator and victim. We only see what actually happens; we don't see the feelings and thoughts of the people involved. So it's fairly easy to harden our hearts to the victim's plight.''
But when we read, we're inside somebody else's skin. When that skin is punctured, we bleed.
With books, we become sensitized to violence instead of blase about it.
``Avid reading,'' Leonhardt writes, ``tends to make kids more aware of other people as people - it helps them develop a heart.''
And not incidentally, a brain.
That's but one of many interesting observations in Leonhardt's useful new book, Keeping Kids Reading: How to Raise Avid Readers in the Video Age (Crown Publishers, 264 pp., $23).
She has made extensive observations of students (as well as of her own three children) over a long teaching career and has interviewed at length high school juniors and seniors who scored well on the verbal section of the Scholastic Aptitude Test.
Her conclusion: The top readers are the ones who read books of their own choice, above and beyond class requirements.
Those top readers tend to do well not merely in English courses but in everything else.
That's because wide reading opens up many avenues of interest.
But Leonhardt cites figures from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the NAEP Reading Report Card) showing that 25 percent of all American 12th graders score below a ``basic'' reading level and 66 percent below a ``proficient'' level. The figures are worse for eighth graders. By the senior year, many poor readers have dropped out of school.
This is bad news.
``Our economic viability and our ability to function as a democratic country depend on our having a literate citizenry,'' Leonhardt points out.
Reading, like lunch, can be a pleasure.
But, also like lunch, it can sustain us, keep us alive.
So how do we instill early a love of reading in our children?
Read to them. With them. Around them.
Don't push the classics too soon, Leonhardt emphasizes. ``Good'' books just don't work like vitamins, however well-intentioned. Encourage series books instead - Baby-sitters Club, Goosebumps, the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew.
Get your daughter going on the Saddle Club, for example, then follow up with Walter Farley's Black Stallion adventures and Marguerite Henry's award-winning Misty stories; later she may be ready for Dick Francis or even - yoicks! - Jane Austen.
Give them what they like, and they will grow into what they need.
Public libraries seek to make this process affordable.
Public schools could do better.
``Few schools understand the crucial importance of having stacks and piles and bookshelves overflowing with comics and magazines and series books and joke books and every other kind of reading that kids can instantly love,'' Leonhardt complains. ``Instead, schools put their money into computers and CD-ROMs and satellite hookups and camcorders and audiovisual libraries and everything you can imagine - except the one thing crucial to education: books.''
Support civilization.
Buy 'em by the bag. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia
Wesleyan College. by CNB