As an elementary school aged child, I was taught two things: if you read books you were smart, if you didn’t read books/didn’t like to read books, you were stupid. This wasn’t a direct lesson, it was more or less taught by people saying “books make you smart.” And since I thought I didn’t like to read, I must have been stupid. And, I later understood that the lessons they taught us were very harmful ones:

Instead of teaching us that reading something you love is important, teachers shamed me and permitted me from reading books below my “grade’s reading level.” But I fell in love with books below my reading level. When I was forced to stop reading them, I stopped reading.

Every spring would be reading season where you had to, I’m not kidding, read 25 books in a few months. I read mostly picture books for this but they didn’t count. I was punished for reading slow. Instead of being able to go on a field trip to a baseball game, me and one other kid were labeled “lazy” and had to sit in the same science lecture the whole day.

I could keep going on and on. There were reading comprehension tests we had to take where we read a short story and had to sit in the hallway with a teacher who asked us questions about it. But instead of asking us about the meaning of the story or deeper questions, we would be asked “how many apples did John pick?” and when I couldn’t remember these hyper specific things, I would break down crying and I was told my reading level was far below the rest of my class’s reading level.

No wonder people quit reading later in life. No wonder I talk to people about a great book I’ve read and they say “I don’t read, I’m not smart.”

It’s sad, it’s traumatic, it’s toxic. How do we fix this so kids never have to feel ashamed to read? How do we teach adults to love to read after this childhood trauma?