Read Aloud!

Learning in An Artful Way

Michael  Van Hecke, President of the Catholic Textbook Project and Headmaster at St. Augustine Academy, Ventura, shared the following advice with parents.

I recently read an article that exhibited, so well, the great and simple beauty of literature. In an age of ever-increasing standards and evaluative data requirements, it was a breath of fresh air. 

While it is still worthy to study literature’s style, elements, and structure in order to become a better practitioner of rhetoric, it is essential to keep that in check. It is very important to keep as part of the weekly (or daily) schedules a time for reading – just reading. While our children were growing up we ended up reading to them most nights for a little while. Some nights it was hard because other duties seemed to be pressuring us to not fit in reading. Some nights we were just so tired. And yet, even on most of those nights we made sure to read at least one chapter of the story we were enjoying.

On the far side of this exercise, we have seen the powerful and lovely benefits of this practice. Our lives and the lives of our children are much richer for the friends we met - Tom Sawyer, Bilbo Baggins and Alice and the Cheshire Cat; the places we visited - Dickens’ London, Dante’s Inferno, and the raccoon’s den where we wait till the moon is full; and the things we saw - trolls, cows jumping over the moon and Pa swinging his ax. Goodnight Moon! 

I shared before the great benefits of reading aloud to the children – it should be a high priority for young children, and a priority which may re-arrange but not disappear even for older children. One suggestion I read for Lent was to decrease “electricity time.” Spend LESS time with TV, radio or the computer - especially the internet where much time is truly wasted in social surfing and Enquirer-like news sites. [The top two trending news stories on yahoo.com right now - ”Texans Cheerleader” and “Chipoltle Guacamole.”]  NOW, take that time and spend it on more human endeavors like playing a game, hand-writing a letter to a friend or relative, or reading a book! 

Consider this letter from Teddy Roosevelt to Mr. Grahame, author of The Wind in the Willows. 

My mind moves in ruts, as I suppose most minds do, and at first I could not reconcile myself to the change from the ever-delightful Harold and his associates, and so for some time I could not accept the toad, the mole, the water-rat, and the badger as substitutes. But after a while [my wife] and two of the boys, Kermit and Ted, all quite independently, got hold of The Wind Among the Willows [sic] and took such delight in it that I began to feel that I might have to revise my judgment. Then [she] read it aloud to the younger children, and I listened now and then. Now I have read it and reread it, and have come to accept the characters as old friends; and I am almost more fond of it than your previous books. Indeed, I feel about going to Africa very much as the sea-faring rat did when he almost made the water-rat wish to forsake everything and start wandering! I felt I must give myself the pleasure of telling you how much we had all enjoyed your book.

As Professor Anthony Esolen reflects, “[W]e do not read The Wind in the Willows in order to build knowledge about talking rats, or to broaden worldviews, whatever that term from political sloganeering is supposed to mean. We read The Wind in the Willows to enter the world of The Wind in the Willows, and maybe learn something about ourselves in the process. But the aim of  reading the work is simply the joy and the wonder of it; it is a good book, because it tells us good and true things in an artful way."