The parents didn’t instill a love of reading in their children. Our home was filled with books. All my children loved reading from an early age. One of them found long novels boring, but he would curl up with other books.
With that said, even though I myself always loved books, too, I don’t think ‘literature’ should be a required course for all majors. JMHO.
“ The parents didn’t instill a love of reading in their children. Our home was filled with books. All my children loved reading from an early age. One of them found long novels boring, but he would curl up with other books.”
Why do they have to love reading?
They do not. They have to know how to read a book. They have to know how to follow the rules of a class, a job, a role in the family
Further, when people don’t read they are uneducated. They must know about characters, the pattern of a story, they are otherwise unfit for conversation, positions in running organizations, knowing how to behave
They do not have to know how to read books and do all of the normal things that adults do in society but if they don’t they will be losers
And they do not have to like reading. They just have to do it
I do not like going to my job. I don’t like the sick office mate that shirks her job, I don’t like working non stop 8-8 I don’t like answering my boss’s questions every hour.
But I learned how to act like an adult in high school. By the time I got to studying for a science degree, I knew how to write a research paper and read enough to not be one of the 56 that washed out of the 87 that went in
When I taught high school English I was given a stack of six books to teach for the year. I know some of the kids didn’t read it. And I didn’t expect the students to like any of the books. But one of the parents asked me why her two sons were quoting Shakespeare on the way home from school.
They had a clue at least. They graduated college.
Few homes are filled with books any more. They prefer the E-book or audiobook when they read at all. Which is fine for adults but does not work for kids.
You need to have physical media for your children. They need to have books to page through, chew on and bang on the floor long before they start to read.
You can tell which children are raised with actual books and who isn't rather quickly. And I am not talking about high brow books or classics. Just regular popular fiction works.
Same in the household I grew up in. My parents read books, so their kids (five of us) did too. I used to check books out of the school library and reread my favorites over and over. My how times have changed with kids today.