"Why privilege the teaching of reading?" Maryanne Wolf answers.

My department (Humanities) was in a meeting to kick off the school year. The facilitator asked the room to answer this question: "What do we value about reading?" There were a few softball answers and a couple of more poetic responses before one colleague said, "I'm wondering why we are privileging reading over other skills." 

My System 2 kicked in and stopped me from doing a whiplash-inducing head turn with an accompanying jaw drop. I ran through a number of scenarios in my brain. Was this a genuine "wonder?" Was my colleague just being provocative? Did one of my colleagues really think that reading isn't the thing? What answer should or would I give to that "wonder?" 

I've come to appreciate that question. And I've also finished Maryanne Wolf's book Reader, Come Home . If you don't think that we should have a sense of urgency about encouraging our students to become stronger, readers, do look to her book for inspiration. 

Why should we privilege reading? 

“The atrophy and gradual disuse of our analytical and reflective capacities as individuals are the worst enemies of a truly democratic society, for whatever reason, in whatever medium, in whatever age” (Wolf 199). 

“It is therefore very urgent right now to support curricular efforts aimed at producing citizens who can take charge of their own reasoning, who can see the different and foreign not as a threat to be resisted but as an invitation to explore and understand, expanding their own minds and their capacity for citizenship”(Wolf quoting Martha Nussbaum 199). 

“The most important contribution of the invention of written language to the species is a democratic foundation for critical, inferential reasoning and reflective capacities. This is the basis of a collective conscience. If we in the twenty-first century are to preserve a vital collective conscience, we must ensure that all members of our society are able to read and think both deeply and well.We will fail as a society if we do not educate our children and reeducate all of our citizenry to the responsibility of each citizen to process information vigilantly, critically, and wisely across media. And we will fail as a society as surely as societies of the twentieth century if we do not recognize and acknowledge the capacity for reflective reasoning in those who disagree with us” (Wolf 200-201). 

“The good readers of a society are both its canaries—which detect the presence of danger to its members—and its guardians of our common humanity”(Wolf 202). 

Mic drop? Wrestle on, reading friends. Especially reading friends.