Yep, that makes you an outlier. Congratulations, it's good that you are, but it doesn't change the fact that the average, or even above average, child in America does not behave in such way.



The last reading promotion I experienced was in... elementary school. It was called SSR, Sustained Silent Reading, and it was a half hour (or so) that we spent each day reading whatever book we brought to class with us. We were also supposed to read another 20 or 30 minutes at home, but people who didn't were not penalized in any way. By middle school, that was all gone. We had a book report a year or so, and that was about it.

So no, schools really don't encourage reading all that much. Most reading is done from textbooks that have excerpts of larger stories in them, but it's hard to truly gain an interest for reading from a chapter or passage of a larger works. It makes the characters transient, and unrelated to the reader. Not to mention that the classes go extremely slowly, so less than 10 excerpts are usually read in a year, from a book that probably contains 50 or more.



I don't normally pry... But when did you go to school? Because I'm 20, so I was in middle school not all that long ago... and I can tell you with absolute certainty, school is not like that now. Other than those anthology textbooks I mentioned above, very, very little reading is done in school. In high school, we read To Kill a Mockingbird, Macbeth, a bit of Hamlet and a bit of Romeo and Juliet, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. And half of those were in the English AP class I took during the last year, so this in no way similar to what the average student would have read, which would be even less. And that's in high school. In middle school aside from those few book reports, there were no actual books that we read at all!



No doubt there are some good teachers and good librarians, and good parents that are properly nurturing to their children's budding love for reading... But they are in the minority. It's a sad fact, but it is fact. The problem was never teachers discouraging reading, but them simply... not caring one way or the other. Teachers in my experience have never been people to come to with problems or for conversations... They just taught, and gave homework, and there the interaction with them ended. The only teachers that I've ever talked to as people were the teachers of AP classes in 11th and 12th grade, but that was more like talking to a wiser peer than to a teacher.

And I'm by no means opposed to reading classics, or think that genre fiction is superior to classics. I think that people should be steered toward them, because they are important and valuable. But I also think that genre fiction has an important role to play in building a person's love for reading, and that there is nothing shameful or inherently bad about it.