Cock of the snook to COD for this.
. . .In Finland they do things differently. Finnish children stay at home much longer. They play and tell stories years after ours are sitting down in school to a target-driven curriculum. Maybe that’s partly why Finnish children are happier, and maybe that’s why they rate higher in the literacy stakes.
Maybe they haven’t put the cart before the horse as we do. They give their children the time and space to grow up with stories, to enjoy them, so that the association develops slowly, organically
. . .We get ourselves all hot and bothered about the teaching of reading, about synthetic phonics and the like, and we forget that none of it is much use unless children want to read in the first place. . . If we really want our children to become readers for life, we would do well to remember that horses are much more fun than carts anyway.
UPDATE – more on how true book-loving changes lives at “Choose Nine Books for Your Gift Box.”.
UPDATE TOO – and Red Molly tells a story of how right reading wrongly, can ruin lives and the will to read (or the will to live, at least!)
[...] the meme version, but the BBC’s real readers voted for plenty of Terry Pratchett and children’s book specialist Roald Dahl (but no Dr. Seuss??) while Jane Austen was put in her place! . . .OTOH, [...]