Blog #6 Readicide

Gallagher brings up many interesting ideas as he talks about Readicide. His points really make you think about the two types of reading: for school and for enjoyment. I believe that Readicide is a major problem. Schools give us these books that are literary fiction, filled with a bunch of content that we don’t understand and feel as if it is our duty to know what it means. They go on to teach us how to comprehend these boring books from ancient times. What’s the point of it? In our real world job, nobody is going to need to know about Shakespeare’s religious metaphors and the figurative language in Macbeth. That doesn’t fuel our imagination or make us any smarter. It simply helps us read old books. This in my opinion is completely and utterly useless. It’s like we’ve been scarred as readers. After reading a literary fiction book in school and having an awful time analyzing every single sentence trying to figure out its’ meaning, we’re NEVER going to want to do it again, especially not for our own enjoyment. No one will say, “Wow, I loved having to figure out every little detail in Romeo and Juliet, I’m going to go read even more Shakespeare.” That’s unrealistic if they think that’s what students do. Some people don’t even read due to the emotional process they were dragged through at school. The people who do read, read genre fiction. Books that they enjoy reading, which they wouldn’t mind having to annotate or do projects on. They read books that inspire and excite them, not bore them to death. We learn valuable lessons from these books rather than knowing the difference between an allusion and symbolism. But, since the joy of reading a good book was killed by our education system, nobody would know the bliss of reading a good book that you can read by yourself and actually enjoy.