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Anyone who wants to do something really good without it costing anything and without even being criticized later by anyone would have had the opportunity this Friday. There was again a reading day, proclaimed by the Stiftung Lesen, the ZEIT and the Deutsche Bahn.
Many adults, including many celebrities, flocked to kindergartens and schools, pulled out a book and gave a story to the best. It's great, every year, really. Unless the debate around it, about the merits of the reading, too often goes in the wrong direction.
Some experts always praise the benefits of reading, which is that children with reading experience later learned to read at school much easier, much faster, and much better than others. Parents need not feel guilty about reading something other than books.
Looking at street signs, reading the WhatsApp messages from the grandma - all this could also promote an interest in language in children, it was only recently in a study. Reading aloud increases, experts agree on the later reading competence, which is a key competence when it comes to educational success.
How reading aloud improves the score
Of course it's clear, because only those who read well understand a complicated math problem, or the instructions for an experiment in chemistry lessons. Those who read well may also learn by heart the capitals of Europe more easily than if they torment themselves painstakingly from letter to letter.
Children who are read regularly would have more fun reading it, "on average have a larger vocabulary and have better grades," it says on the website for the reading day. That's all right, but: "Seriously?" My kid, 12, would say so, not only because that's just his favorite term. It is right.
If the benefits of the reading are primarily associated with performance enhancement, people forget the most important thing: reading is a subversive act.
Reading empowers people to think about themselves, to develop visions, to challenge rules. It changes your own self. Radical. In the literature limits of time and space are suspended, everything is possible. Does not work, does not exist. That starts with the subject of the reading.
"You can not start life, this one-of-a-kind carriage ride, when it's over, but when you hold a book, no matter how difficult it is, you can go back to the beginning, all over again begin to grasp the difficult and therefore the whole life ", writes Orhan Pamuk in" The White Fortress ".
Reading aloud in the factory - if necessary secretly
In the "History of Life" Alberto Manguel describes how workers in cigar factories in Cuba were read in the mid-19th century. According to them, they paid a colleague: "Listening made the mechanical, dull work of wrapping the dark, fragrant tobacco leaves more bearable for the workers, allowing them to share in the adventures of the heroes of the novel, giving them ideas in their heads to wallow and to own oneself. "
The lectures were so successful that they quickly earned the reputation of being "subversive." No wonder that Cuba's governor forbade reading in 1866 again. Secretly, it should still have been continued for a while.
Anyone who reads, even if he or she is just a child or an adult, develops empathy, discovers different perspectives, follows new utopias, may even become rebellious.
"You can not force me to read," says my pubescent child, to whom I read a lot a few years ago. Caught. Of course, I did not want to force it, but persuade me a bit?
The word "read" tolerates no imperative
The word "read" does not tolerate any imperative, much like "love," writes French teacher and author Daniel Pennac in "Like a Novel." He tells about it in his son, who resembles my child. This son, as a small child big fan of read stories, does not like to read, at least not since he goes to school.
Can that be changed?
According to Pennac, the dogma cultivated in middle-class circles of having to read , recognize, and throw overboard can help rediscover the pleasure of reading, as well as the memory of an important thought: "Read aloud should be a gift for that one should not demand the least consideration ", writes Pennac, it should be" in the land of purpose freedom "proceed. "Purpose, which is the only currency of art."
Perhaps this idea has been lost in the general debate about reading aloud here and there, and also our parents over the years, at least among older children? It is worth finding it again - and reading it. Just like that, without ulterior motive.