Emily Dickenson said, “There is no frigate like a book,” and she was right.  Books can take you places, but not always to good places.  Anthony Esolen, in this 2005 essay, reminds us that we’re fixated on the idea of reading-as-a-good-thing-always.  We’ve become convinced that reading, and reading alone, is the key indicator of a young person’s ability to learn.  It’s true that in Western Civilization, the greatest minds were usually the ones who were skilled in speaking and listening (500BC – 1500AD) and then reading and writing (1500AD-2008AD), but that fact doesn’t always translate very well to the education of youth.  Consider boys.

The problem with our boys is not that they don’t read. They don’t read-and this may make them more truly educable in the long, long run than their sisters, though it makes school more than usually cramping for them. The problem is that we’ve forgotten that there is any form of education other than that to be had by reading. For Christians this amnesia is particularly inexplicable, since Jesus was no bandier of quotes, nor was it an owlish rabbi who whipped the moneychangers.

Esolen continues with this delicious warning that reading is not always a good thing:

Reading is no more to be done for its own sake than is eating. Good food can trim your waist and harden your muscles, and bad food can make you fat and slow and ready for disease. Bad reading not only wastes time; not only does it fail in its vaunted objective, to make you “well-rounded,” whatever that twinkie image is supposed to mean; bad reading makes you stupid. Assuming that if you are not reading, you must be doing something, anything, bad reading at the least steals away time you might spend planing a board or walking down by the river to search for turtles; at worst, it inoculates you against good reading.

This isn’t so much an invective against classical education as a thankful reminder that universal education is about as useful as a universal shoe size.  Boys might love reading more if they weren’t told it was the only way to learn something.  Boys know better.