Time for yourself

Philip Pullman, who used to be a teacher, has an interesting article on how constant testing of schoolkids is driving them away from the idea of reading just for fun:

My last point concerns reading. I recently read through the sections on reading in key stages 1 to 3 of the national literacy strategy, and I was very struck by something about the verbs. I wrote them all down. They included "reinforce", "predict", "check", "discuss", "identify", "categorise", "evaluate", "distinguish", "summarise", "infer", "analyse", "locate"... and so on: 71 different verbs, by my count, for the activities that come under the heading of "reading". And the word "enjoy" didn't appear once.

If we forget the true purpose of something, it becomes empty, a mere meaningless ritual. The purpose of what I do as a writer is to delight. I hope that the children who read me will do so because they enjoy it.

But this is what happens in schools now: a teacher wrote to me recently and complained that she'd been doing a book of mine called The Firework Maker's Daughter with her pupils, and she said she was finding the greatest difficulty preventing them from reading ahead to find out what was going to happen next. They had to stop, just when they got interested, and start predicting, or analysing, or evaluating, or something. They wanted to enjoy it, but she didn't feel she could let them.