It is worthy of notice that many of this generation, fed on text-books, on anthologies and on abstracts, cannot read.

[Education] has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.

The modern school with its many books, but without systematic lectures, turns out many graduates who are lacking in retentiveness and no sooner than the sound of the words has left their teachers' lips, the subject been forgotten; and if they are called upon to explain the theme, it is reduced to an incomprehensible mass of meaningless words.

I think they assign things to students which are way over their heads, which destroy your love of reading, rather than leading you to it. I don't understand that. Gosh.

I do not know when it is that the joy fades out of school for most children, so that they end not only by 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.

Sherman Alexie wrote, “There are millions of teens who read because they are sad and lonely and enraged. They read because they live in an often-terrible world. They read because they believe, despite the callow protestations of certain adults, that books — especially the dark and dangerous ones — will save them.

In my opinion, the answer to what makes a reluctant reader is the lack of motivation in the home; non-reading parents, lack of verbal communication, working parents too tired to answer questions, lack of books around the house, and too much dependence on television for entertainment. But the reluctant reader must learn to read, and that is left to the school. The school is not without fault in failing him. Too much stress on pedagogical reading material has left no room for reading for pleasure; in fact it has destroyed any incentive for it. Somewhere on the way, the individuality of the child has been lost in the effort to make of him just "teaching material." Classes that are too large have made matters worse. Lucky is the child from such a group that finds the public library and discovers its picture book or reading hours.

I personally regret the shift in literary study from reading primary texts to reading critical and theoretical texts. The major problem today among students is that they simply have not read enough literature. Consequently they do not have the necessary background to take a critical attitude towards literary theory. One needs to test every abstraction against experience.

Books just don’t register with this crowd. They think I lack common sense; I think they lack a part of their souls.

It’s important that young people find the right books that speak to them at the right time, otherwise you might be encouraging them to dislike reading.

The young student sits with his head bent over his books, and his mind straying in youth's dreamland; where prose is prowling on the desk and poetry hiding in the heart.

And how we are going to teach well by using books written by people who don’t quite understand what they’re talking about, I cannot understand. I don’t know why, but the books are lousy; UNIVERSALLY LOUSY!

There are those who will laugh at those who read useful books, and yet there is little difference between those who cannot read and those who will not read — the result of both is ignorance.

His whole mind has been given to books, and I am hardly exaggerating if I say that they are more real to him than Nature. He imagines that all knowledge can be got out of books, and rests upon the authority of some master or other; nor does he entertain any misgiving that the method of learning which led to proficiency in the rules of grammar will suffice to lead him to a mastery of the laws of Nature. The youngster, thus unprepared for serious study, is turned loose among his medical studies, with the result, in nine cases out of ten, that the first year of his curriculum is spent in learning how to learn.