Books teach reading

Roald Dahl

Teachers teach children to read, right? And sometimes parents do. Yet children's author Roald Dahl had a different idea: Books teach children to read. It makes sense.

Most of what we learn we learn because we want to learn it. You learn to bake a pie because you want to bake a pie. You learn auto mechanics because you have an interest in motors and machinery. And so it is with reading. My grandson learned to read at a young age, nearly two years before he started school, because he wanted to play a computer game that required reading.

The books that parents read to their young children, if they are exciting enough and funny enough, will encourage the children to want to learn to read such books by themselves.

Dahl's idea was to write the kind of books children like to read. And the books that children like to read are not necessarily the kind of books parents, teachers and librarians want them to read. The author of James and the Giant Peach and other classics often had trouble with publishers, parents, teachers and librarians for this very reason.

Dahl once described what, in his view, children love to read: "They love chocolates and toys and money. They love being made to giggle. They love seeing the villain meet a grisly death. But they hate descriptive passages and flowery prose. What else do they love? New inventions. Unorthodox methods. Eccentricity. Secret information. The list is long."

The writer also knew that children are not put off by long words providing those words are fun to say, with the definitions suggested by the context or the words themselves. He filled his books with many invented words: scrumdiddlyuptious, fizzwiggler and squizzle, for example. The words were fun to say and fun to imagine meanings for.

Dahl echoed an idea also expressed by C.S. Lewis, author of the Narnia books, when he said, "The nicest small children, without the slightest doubt, are those who have been fed upon fantasy. The nastiest are the ones who know all the facts."