Most kids are forced to learn to read by our current coercive education system at age 5-7, as part of their first true lessons. This often leads to the image that school is the only place kids learn to read. Nope, in fact, secondary school RUINED my interest in reading. Let me explain my rise, fall and revival of this interest.
My First Book
This is a topic I talked a lot about with my Mom in my quest to self-identity. I first thought I learned to read from a manual of an old vacuum cleaner. While this and my general interest in tech did lead the way, it was well-known that when I was presented with an alphabet chart, I not only noted every single letter, but in the right order as well! I was ~4 years old when this was done at many a school in Utrecht (where I live) and so many of them denied access. They said they couldn't work with me and my already rebellious spirit. So that filled the gap which explained that I learned to read before that moment, but how did that happen?
The Hole in the Ceiling
Another often told anecdote about me was from when my bed had to move upstairs as part of a larger home improvement project. This was also the moment my old baby bed was replaced with a larger bed in which I still sleep, complete with the matress and overhead netting. It was only around this time that I felt: 'now that I'm going in a big bed, I have to become like a big and strong person!' And so I did. I first learnt to get upstairs and downstairs on my own, defeating the securities initially put in place. That led me to defeating other safety locks on cupboards and drawers, and learning to open and close doors on my own: one time I ran towards a door to do this only for my Mom to try to chase me. I outran her and she was left with a bruise. I stil feel kind-of naughty about this. These statements also further close the gap: I probably learned to read myself, without much guidance beyond my Mom reading to me, around the later MONTHS of my third year of life.
An Age of Words came to an End
During primary school I read an absolute lot! I sometimes even recall quickly running to the nearby bookshelf to grab a book I was interested in. Especially books about animals, nature and tech were VERY interesting, even (yes!) manuals of equipment like microwaves, washing machines, VCRs, TVs, HiFi... But also many stories and fictional books of other kinds, notably 'Dolfje Weerwolfje', 'The Treehouse' ('de Waanzinnige Boomhut') by Andy & Terry, Harry Potter in the later years... But then came secondary school.
:(:(:(:(:( the WORST years of my life! Levels of coercion, already kind-of-too-much for me and a classmate of mine who had to take some kind of pills unlike me, went up to 11. Lessons became SO boring that at some point, I installed TeamViewer on the iPad I had to get just to log into my home PC and work on things going on there. I wasn't able to make any friends: so drowsy I had to take the lift often despite its illegality (rebellious me!), I didn't ask anything to others in breaks than 'do you have a [food item] left over for me?' This was also when I was forced into reading a set number of books from arbitrary lists, just to make a summary of them. I used the old trick: taking existing information and combining it into a 'new' summary. My Mom and I read together sometimes: no dice. I simply lost my interest in reading almost completely. No more books, no more old manuals... Books became associated with the assignments I had to make in a way very similar to the Epsillons in Adolus Huxley's 'Brave New World' (I got from one summary of the book). There was no way this conditioning can be reversed, right???
Restoring the damage done...
At the moment I am trying to get the fun back in reading: keeping a book close to me and trying at least to read it when I have the mood and courage to do so. I already completed Hiro Arikawa's "The Travelling Cat Chronicles" and the 'Rivers' set of stories from Martin Michael Driessen. Currently reading 'The Silence' by Anya Niewierra' (all stories in Dutch).
EMERGENCY RETURN