I can remember the book, if not the exact year, that marked the transition from my mother reading stories to me each night to me taking over the page-turning alone, often huddled in corner of my room or planted, upside down in my bed, with my feet dangling over the headboard. It was “A Wrinkle in Time,” the first in Madeleine L’ Engle’s trilogy of sci-fi novels, which tracks the interplanetary quest of a quirky band of teenage ec centrics hunting for a miss ing parent. Their guides are Mrs. Who, Mrs. Whatsit, and Mrs. Which, who transport the teens from place to place — each strange and magical in a different way — using a supernatural process that bends time and space.
I couldn’t get enough of that book. Or its characters.
Or its boundless appeal to my sense of adventure or imagination.
I read the sequels myself.
Then it was off to dozens of other novels, each of which introduced me to concepts I hadn’t considered, or to characters I still count as fantasy chums.
When I think about the thousands of Detroit children we aren’t teaching to read, as evidenced by the awful na tional test scores released last week, I think this is one of the most important things we’re stealing from them.
Reading is a skill. And yes, a task.
But isn’t it also a doorway to mystery and wonder, to thoughts, ideas and emotions that we wouldn’t have other wise experienced? It’s one of the first ways we learn about possibilities and differences, about the whole idea that there are lives to be lived that may be largely incompa rable to our own.
Think of how important that should be to children in Detroit, especially. Many live in real-life circumstances that offer very little of that healthy mystery or wonder.
The city’s deep poverty is a physical trap for so many.
Stories might be the only entrée to potential or un derstanding for lots of city children.
As a child in Detroit in the 1970s and 1980s, I found kinship with the characters in the Great Brain series, written by John Dennis Fitz gerald, about life in the small, slow fictitious Utah town of Adenville. A biography of Abraham Lincoln convinced me that, like him, I could grow up to be president without attending school past the third grade. (Better story: My mother indulged it for a week.) I’m certainly not down playing the more grounded urgency in making sure every child learns to read.
Those who don’t, we all know, are more likely to drop out, more likely to become trapped in lives of little or no productivity, more likely to themselves bear children who won’t learn to read, either.
That was a siren that sounded last week, when test scores revealed that De troit’s children are sitting, alone, at the very bottom of a deep well of urban unde rachievement. We need to rally everyone and marshal every resource to rescue them.
I’m certain we will, but I think we also need to remember why.
It’s not just to produce self-sufficient cogs who’ll help make the machinery of our society go.
It’s to give them a gift with so much more significance.
When I was in the seventh grade at U of D Jesuit, we read “Lord of the Flies” in our reading class. (Yes, we had a distinct class, every day, focused entirely on reading novels. The Jesuits do not putter when it comes to literacy.) And how fitting was it for a class of 25 pre-teen boys in a prep school to be reading a book about a group of mostly pre-teen boys from a prep school stranded on an island after a plane crash?
We couldn’t help relating the divisions William Golding played out between his char acters to our own little class.
Who’d want to do work and keep order? Who’d want to indulge the freedom from adult oversight, and run wild? I remember it so viv idly.
This wasn’t just work.
It was fun.
Kids who never learn to read get cheated out of that fun.
It’s up to all of us to help end that swindle.
| STEPHEN HENDERSON IS EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR FOR THE FREE PRESS.
CONTACT HIM AT SHENDERSON600@FREEPRESS.COM, OR AT 313-222-6659.
SURE, LITERACY IS FUNDAMENTAL. BUT TEACHING KIDS TO READ ISN’ T JUST ABOUT PRODUCING SELF-SUFFICIENT COGS THAT MAKE THE MACHINERY OF OUR SOCIETY GO.
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