Reading is at the heart of education, the basic skill upon which all others are built. Charles J. Sykes
Masinde Muliro University of Technology’s Prof. Egara Kabaji decried the lack of a strong culture of reading in our schools in this paper.
“Most students complete secondary school having only read the prescribed set books, rarely venturing beyond examination texts. Their vocabulary, imagination and critical thinking remain stunted,” he noted, saying this culture must change if the Competency Based Curriculum (CBC) is to succeed.
I entirely agree with him. There is a reading crisis among young, ostensibly educated Kenyans. A cursory interaction with most of them shows that they have not read anything worth reading outside set books, which they study for Literature and Kiswahili.
The lack of reading culture is attributable to a number of factors.
First, students rely entirely on textbooks for most of their education. The schooling system—not the educational system—has cut them off from extensive reading. It is too obsessed with syllabus coverage and examinations to incorporate reading in its school programmes.
What is the matter with exposure to textbooks other than books? Do textbooks teach? Do they imbue learners with the necessary stuff for education?
They do, but up to a point. However, textbooks are overly simplified. It lacks the imaginative and critical thinking powers that books possess. Let us face it: textbook writers write either to the level of the average or the slow student. Great thinkers in question believe that textbooks are either at the student’s grade level or below it. They are therefore not sufficiently challenging to the minds that bright or gifted student schools receive at their gates.
An education system where students overly depend on textbooks is a contradiction. At least 80 per cent of its students must interact with books other than textbooks. The bright and the gifted belong here.
Additionally, great education systems around the world cater to the needs of gifted students by providing them with an extra reading load. They give the students books, which are slightly above their grade level. The content in the books is more challenging reading material. Such students suffer when denied access to books other than textbooks.
The second reason for the deficiency of reading culture among the majority of young educated Kenyans leaving high school or college is that they lack reading fluency. Reading habits depend on reading fluency. Let’s be clear: reading fluency is the master skill upon which the development of other skills or competencies depends.
For the lay, reading fluency is the ability to read with proper speed, accuracy, and expression. It is reading with and for meaning. Students who struggle with the mechanics of reading have difficulty mastering these skills.
A principal of a day secondary school in Kakamega County recently told me that his students fear reading. The students’ fear arises from the inability to read with and for meaning. Reading is much more than moving eyes on the printed page. Reading is thinking.
Students who fear reading have a serious aversion to reading. They have difficulties reading prescribed textbooks, let alone books, which are more challenging.
The third reason for the lack of reading culture is that most learners transition to grade four or standard four without having learned how to read effectively.
Two months ago, learners were transitioning to higher grades without having properly mastered the reading skills of the earlier grades. In a report entitled, State of Education in Kenya Research Report, Zizi Afrique Foundation and Usawa Agenda revealed that only 4 in 10 Grade 4 learners could read and understand a Grade 3-level English story, while only 3 in 10 Grade 6 learners could not read & understand a Grade 3-level English story.
According to experts on reading, learners who transition to grade four without having mastered reading face difficulties in reading. They should have mastered how to read by grade three to enable them to cope with learning in subsequent grades. Ordinarily, in the first three years of primary education, children learn how to read. In grade four and subsequent grades, they read to learn. There is a fundamental pedagogical distinction between learning to read and reading to learn.
You cannot cultivate a reading culture if you have not mastered reading. Reading for leisure. Reading out of curiosity. Reading to know the whys and wherefores of the mysteries of life and the environment.
Giving every child the skills they need to read and write well is a central ambition of our education system. The importance of literacy extends beyond its crucial role in enabling learning across the curriculum. Literacy matters in countless aspects of daily life—throughout the life course— and it significantly influences the opportunities that children and adults have available to them, Chief Executive Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), Professor Becky Francis says.
EEF is an independent charity in the UK which supports schools, colleges, and early years’ settings to improve teaching and learning through better use of evidence.
The fourth reason for the lack of reading culture is that most primary and secondary schools in this country do not provide library lessons in their timetables.
For some strange reasons, schools have not only expunged library lessons from their programmes, but they have also either shut down the school libraries that some of them had or replaced the books in the libraries with textbooks. Even some of the most elite secondary schools in this country are victims of this strange phenomenon.
READ ALSO:
Reviving the golden age of public primary schools in rural areas
I visited many schools when the then District Commissioners were invited to officiate educational functions in the schools. I also visited schools as part of the Ministry of Education’s outreach efforts. When opportunity allowed, I visited the respective libraries of the schools where we had functions.
What did I meet? I met derelict libraries. Some schools had replaced books with textbooks in bookshelves. The books in question served the schools well in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. Why? The books were irrelevant to the curriculum under the 8.4.4 system of education. Will they return the books to the shelves now that communication is one of the competencies under the CBE system? Time will tell.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, public primary schools had libraries complete with a library prefect to issue books to students who borrowed them. We no longer have a librarian or a prefect for books in most primary schools, public and private.
In other words, many serving teachers have virtually no time for any reading matter that is not directly relevant to the prescribed syllabus. They would rather have revision books—digests of the curriculum content in all subjects—in the school libraries or with the students. Books—story books, encyclopedias, atlases, and nonfiction books in general knowledge. Tawe.
Extensive reading is the superstructure of education. The substructure for extensive reading is reading fluency, a curriculum delivery system that aims at developing, without equivocation, the innate abilities of learners.
Further, extensive reading implies the presence of a library system in schools, among others. It implies ransacking the school library, if it exists.
By Buhere Kennedy
You can also follow our social media pages on Twitter: Education News KE and Facebook: Education News Newspaper for timely updates.
>>> Click here to stay up-to-date with trending regional stories
>>> Click here to read more informed opinions on the country’s education landscape
>>> Click here to stay ahead with the latest national news.
