Unit 4 how to develop the habit of reading

1. Read the extract from P.S. Buck’s book “My Several Worlds”. Learn the new vocabulary. Summarize the extract.

2. Answer the following questions:

What puzzles and shocks the author?

According to the author, what is the purpose of education and what are the obstacles to true learning?

Did you notice that the joy fades out of school for some children in this country too? How can you account for it?

P.S. Buck insists that "most children end by hating school and what is worse hating books". Why is this grave indeed?

3. Find in the extract the arguments the author gives to illustrate the following:

True learning can be achieved only through intensive reading.

Compulsory education is doing a lot of harm.

Books are indispensable to any civilization.

Do you agree with all these statements? Why or why not?

My several worlds

by P.S. Buck

I cannot remember at all when I learnt to read. I know I read quite comfortably at four, because on my fifth birthday I received a small book as a gift, entitled "Little Susie's Seven Birthdays" and I envied Susie for having seven instead of five. Yet my American children learned reading with strange difficulty and I am shocked at the number of our people, both men and women, but especially men, who read slowly, word by word, and are never comfortable in reading and do not enjoy it; although the purpose of education should be to make reading as simple and easy as listening to a voice, for only when a person can really read will he surely continue his own education.

Upon education one can write many books. Examinations, tests, grades, compositions – these are all obstacles to true learning. Were I young again – how many things I would do if I were young again. I would create a school where children could drink in knowledge as they drink in fresh milk. They drink because they are thirsty, and children are always thirsty for learning, but they do not know it. And in schools sources of learning are fouled with tensions, anxieties, competitive sports, and the shame and fear of low marks and it is no wonder that we are not a book-loving people. We have been made to hate books and therefore to scorn, with private regret mixed in, the educated man because he is an intellectual. Compulsory education? I doubt the wisdom of it, and certainly the use of the word ‘compulsion’ is not wise. Education, yes, but not this sausage mill, this hopper, into which our children are all tossed at the age of 6, and from which they emerge, too many of them, in dazed confusion, somewhere along the way, as rejects or a mass products.

Never shall I forget the first morning I took our little sons to school. They went trustingly and with enthusiasm, believing, alas, that they .were about to comprehend immediately the wonders. Thus, one the fair-headed, said joyfully, "I am going to learn how to make an airplane". My heart ached, I confess, when he began to understand how long the road, how weary the hours would be until that day could arrive. But my heart has often ached for such little scholars, their sweet enthusiasm dying in the daily grind. I will not criticize our schools, for I do not know how to make compulsory education pleasant. Yet to me learning, learning anything, but especially something I want to know, is the most joyful occupation in life. I do not know when it is that the joy fades out of school for most children, so that they end not only hating school but even worse, by hating books, and this is grave indeed, for in books alone is the accumulated wisdom of the whole human race, and to read no books is to deprive the self of ready access to wisdom. Even in China such wisdom was relayed generation to generation, through centuries, until the people were permeated with the sayings of poets and philosophers. But in our mixed ancestry there are no such clean streams, and it is only in books that we can discover what we are, and why we are that and thus self-knowledge, as well as knowledge of others, is achieved.