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My message to the boy who hates reading
From:
Patrick Asare -- Author of 'The Boy from Boadua' Patrick Asare -- Author of 'The Boy from Boadua'
For Immediate Release:
Dateline: Wyomissing, PA
Sunday, January 26, 2025

 

What do I want to be when I grow up? I am thinking about this question quite a bit lately and I have a few ideas in mind. Evangelist is close to the top of the list. I would very much like to travel around the world to spread the gospel about the transformative power of reading. Even if that doesn’t become my main occupation, I will find ways to share this message with as many people, especially children, as I practically can.

In most advanced nations, literacy is something that is almost taken for granted. That is not the case in poorer parts of the world. In a place like America, multiple avenues exist for children to gain reading competency. Even then, there are large numbers of people in this country, both young and adult, who are functionally illiterate. The damaging impact of that deficiency on the lives of such individuals is immeasurable.

Because of how the simple act of learning to read totally changed my life, I cringe whenever I hear any young person say that they don’t like reading. That, to my dismay, is what I came across in this recent article in the Washington Post. A mother, whose eleven-year-old son told her he hated reading, was at her wits’ end and had written to one of the newspaper’s advice columnists asking for guidance on what to do.

The columnist, a previous English teacher, cited a number of reasons why she thinks certain children loathe reading. She mentioned that for some, it is “something about it is hard for me.” But for others, she said that the causes can be more complicated than that. Executive functioning issues, dyslexia, and eyesight problems are among conditions that, in her experience, make reading difficult for some people. However, she went on to say that in most other cases, it simply comes down to personal preference. There are other activities that such people find more enjoyable than reading. She advised the worried mother to dig a little deeper to find out what the real factors were in her son’s case, but cautioned her not to push him too hard into reading because it would only make matters worse.

Those were all great words of wisdom from the columnist. Most of us know people who don’t like to read. If the aversion is due to some disorder, there are, at least in the developed world today, medical and therapeutic advances that help people overcome these handicaps. But my experience tells me that for most people, avoidance of reading is almost completely due to lack of interest.

I don’t know the specific situation of the boy mentioned in the article so I cannot make a concrete judgment. But I want to send him a message anyway. The harsh reality is that for anyone to be able to navigate this modern world successfully, they must know how to read and write. So, no one really has the luxury to decide whether they like to read or not. It is a must.

Nowadays, I am often reminded of the situation many people in my Ghanaian village found themselves in when I was growing up there in the 1960s and 70s. Most of the adults there had close relatives who lived in other parts Ghana. Because telephones were nonexistent then, when folks needed to communicate with their family members elsewhere in emergency situations, they typically sent emissaries who traveled by bus to deliver the messages. But in cases where the matters were less urgent, the information was often delivered through written correspondence. The problem was that because of mass illiteracy, most people couldn’t write letters on their own. Someone smelled a business opportunity.

An elderly man set up a kiosk near the village square to provide this service. He had relocated to the village from another town. As I later learned, writing letters for others was an industry in Ghana at the time because illiteracy was a national problem. Adult men and women in the village went to the elderly man to get their letters written. Because he was operating in a public space, there was absolutely no privacy. Making matters worse, quite often, there were multiple people sitting on a bench inside the kiosk waiting in line. The whole thing was like being in a barber shop. People were sometimes forced to divulge extremely sensitive personal and family information in the presence of their neighbors. Neither the “professional” writer nor his clients were bound by any non-disclosure agreements.

I want the boy to put himself into the shoes of one of those clients. Because of the availability of telephones and other advanced communication devices nowadays, almost no one, even those who live in the remotest parts of the globe, is likely to face the humiliation that those men and women in my village had to deal with decades ago. But being illiterate in today’s world can be equally damaging, if not more.

We hear a lot nowadays about the need for infants to be read to by their parents and caregivers. Experts say it is the best way to set any child on the path to literacy. I didn’t have that luxury. Both of my parents were illiterate so they couldn’t read anything themselves. The village didn’t have a library, and there was not a single book in any house there. The act of reading was a completely unknown concept. I discovered it purely by accident. I got hooked around age eight, when I read a few words on a scrap of paper that I picked up from the ground in the village square one day.

To feed this new “addiction,” I decided that I would use my breakfast money to buy the national daily newspaper, copies of which were sold at the village post office. It was the only reading material available. I had to buy a dictionary almost immediately because I didn’t know most of the words I came across in the newspaper. I meticulously kept a few notebooks in which I recorded unfamiliar words and their meanings. Over several years, I painstakingly built up a vocabulary. Essentially, I taught myself to read and write. Those two skills I developed were what facilitated my exit from the village to boarding school, university in the Soviet Union, and graduate studies at Purdue University and Dartmouth College in America. I can trace every single one of my academic and professional achievements thus far to that fateful decision to sacrifice breakfast for reading material at that very young age.

I sincerely hope that the boy’s hatred of reading is not due to some disorder. If the disinterest is because he finds reading hard, my message for him would be this: If I managed to teach myself to read and write with such scanty resources in that desolate village in Ghana, then any child anywhere should be able to learn to read. That is particularly true of him. He is lucky to have been born in America, where he is surrounded by all kinds of books.

The boy should count himself extremely lucky in one other respect. He has a mother who is capable of writing to a Washington Post columnist. It means that he is growing up in a home with well-educated parents who can provide him all the support he needs to become a competent reader, whatever his problem is. He should seize the opportunity with both hands.

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