Reading habits of students

Satish Kumar Sarma

(The writer is former Head of the Department of Economics, Biswanath College, Kalyanpur, Biswanath Chariali)

Whatever other dissatisfactions and apprehensions have been caused by actions and attitudes of students nowadays, there has been little room for complaint that their reading has suffered. I mean reading as a habit is unconnected with lessons or examinations. Let us say more precisely, the habit of having one’s attention is occupied by printed matter. There is no doubt that present students - ranging in age from four to twenty - read a great deal. However, what they read and why and whether their soul benefits or suffers by it, is another question altogether. Even our young children read more. About ten decades ago general reading was all but unknown. But the student partook of a life at home in which the oral tradition of instruction and education was firmly rooted. And thus the purely formal training of the school was well-balanced by a very informal and almost unconscious absorption of classical and scriptural literature with a generous admixture of folklore, proverbs and superstitions.

As a former member of the Academic Council and Faculty of Arts of Gauhati University, I believe our immediate problems in education are vast and can be treated only on a mass scale. But side by side with this must be examined the finer or more subtle problems of education the solution of which would alter not the content or method but the texture of our education; the difference it would make would be like the difference between the mountain and the pyramid. One of them is child education. For the health and habits and mentality of today’s children will give birth to the attitudes and institutions of tomorrow. The reading habits of students are another. This question which is largely conditioned by the teaching habits of teachers, includes both the study of curricular texts – (i) a subject which would involve argument about the aims and purposes of education and its ideals and on which therefore only experienced educationists should give tongue and (ii) the leisure-hour and general reading of students. In our country an evaluation of the latter - especially at this stage of linguistic sensitiveness - at once involves questions of quality, quantity and availability. In tackling this one problem alone we are about many years behind some western countries which having introduced and carried through a programme of country-wide and compulsory education have been able

systematically to take up the more ticklish problems connected with it. Extensive studies have been made of the socio-psychological implications and physiology of reading habits as also of the reading interests and preferences of various age groups and data collected of rate, comprehension and speed of reading at different physical and mental levels. Education has been made a subject of serious scientific study. It is this kind of study which must be undertaken in our country. Of course, this would imply a readiness to think scientifically, an attitude of mind which is inimical to the national temperament.

But a scientific approach can be at two levels - one, the approach of a person whose temperament has been built upon and shaped by a mechanized civilization when it becomes almost an organic trait. It is the temperament which in its extreme form cannot think of an individual without automatically breaking him down to what has been called the ‘spiritual sub-soil’ twenty-four pairs of chromosomes and various chemical compounds held together-by the homeostatic principle. The second and more elementary and expedient type of scientific approach is scientific only in the sense of being statistical and categorical. It is the approach to a problem which has to be dealt in bulk and which has to be divided into manageable classifications. On the subject of reading habits of students, for instance, it is the effort to analyse in a general way the urges and motivations which drive and drag students to books and by syllogistic reasoning to arrive at various common denominations. Large countries with rapidly increasing populations have to adopt this method.

What do our students read beside their textbook? What are the kinds of books they are interested in and what decides their taste? Student life ranges on an average ten to fifteen years. These years constitute physically, emotionally and psychologically, three distinct periods in a student’s life. Very young children like books of stories bound in bright wrappers and illustrated and printed in elementary colours – animal stories, nature tales of a fanciful and fantastic nature and simple fairy tales, Panchatantra, Cinderella, Snow-White and Peter Pan and Tarzan – almost in that order. Boys and girls from say ten to fourteen at a general estimate demand a certain degree of realism in their stories, that is, adventures even of an improbable nature but happening to men and women of flesh and blood; the exciting doings of Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, tales of patriotism and heroism and stories of school and home life. This is the age when every year increases the reading and assimilation capacity of the young student and widens his and her interests. Richmal Crompton, Mark Twain, R. L. Stevenson, Deniel Defoe, Angela Brazil, Susan Coolidge and Lousia M. Alcott, Harriet

Beecher Stowe are eagerly read during this time.

Boys also read mystery and detective stories and become seriously interested in sports and develop a sense of humour and delight in puns and crack obvious jokes. Young girls in their early teens, especially coming from conservative middle-class families become avid readers of stories in vernacular week-end magazines. The inhibited attitude of many of our young girls to sex and their ideas about the travails and adjustments of marriage and maternity are probably derived from this reading.

In dealing with the reading habits, especially of young people, the very first fact which has to be understood is the potentiality of the printed word. The printed word has a hypnotic quality about it. It can influence beliefs, attitudes, morale, public opinion, voting and antisocial behaviour. It can unite people by emphasizing common interests and traditions and ideals or cause rifts in the social fabric by overstressing differences.

It is a powerful and potent instrument for moulding the thoughts of the young. A book can break down psychopathic defences, which no amount of parental moralizing can do. So the message carried by the printed word strikes the young mind at its most vulnerable moment, when it is relaxed and receptive.

The mind of the student is like blotting paper. It can absorb; absorb and absorb anything that is fed in to it. But it has very little taste and its sense of judgment is not quite developed. There is not a college boy or girl now, for instance, who does not believe that all books which have been produced into films are great literature. The student’s mind when he is ready to leave student life, is like a patchwork quilt of undigested ideas and scattered memories.

It need not be so. And this, as you will agree I am sure, is where the teacher comes in. So perhaps we might with benefit undertake research into the reading habits first of teachers themselves.