Letters: A teacher’s lessons for Rod Liddle
How to kill reading Sir: I am appalled by the response to Andrew Watts’s concerns about the teaching of reading at his son’s school. His article reveals a system almost guaranteed to discourage reading and an alarming turning away by a school from its responsibility to parents who have entrusted it with their children (‘Schoolboy error’, 17 January). Effective reading involves immersing oneself in the text without distractions, going at one’s own pace. The degree of involvement will be determined by the material and by the engagement of the reader. The remark by Andrew’s son’s head of English, that the school’s reading programme was not supposed to encourage reading for pleasure, indicates a wilful disdain for effective reading.
