From an interview with sci-fi author Orson Scott Card (Ender's Game):
Reading has always been a minority sport. Yes, we all learn how to read in school, but we aren't all taught to love it. But if you want to find anybody to blame for the decline in reading, look at the miserable things they require students to read in school. They teach students systematically that anything that they like to read is crap...and anything that is "good" according to the professors or the teachers is actually unreadable drivel. I mean, anybody who requires a child to read The House of Seven Gables or The Scarlet Letter -- Nathaniel Hawthorne was never a good writer. The only reason he's in our literary pantheon is because he was the first American that the Brits took seriously, and we had such an inferiority complex we knew that must mean he was good. But he wasn't good; this stuff is impenetrable. I would rather have schoolchildren emerge from school having read The Princess Bride and Holes than to have them come out having read The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick. The group that comes out having read The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick will hate reading; they'll think of it as a tedious duty that they'll avoid at all costs." --
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