Reading and libraries at school: how to transform our pupils into readers for all the life long

Abstract

When we talk about youth reading in informal contexts, the most widespread sensation is that today’s adolescents and children don’t read anymore.

This statement rather rooted in a school context is misleading. I point out, first of all, about the use of the adverb anymore, which implies that actually today’s young people are those who don’t read, when instead they were used to, in the old times.

People’s thought inevitably runs to the use/abuse of new technologies undoubtedly the diffusion of the digital technologies have been capturing the new generations’ attention, in a pervasive and totalizing way.

But is it really the case to attribute to the digital all the responsibilities? In this way we would never finish to remove these responsibilities from the whole world tied to the education of children and boys (families, schools, libraries, etc.)?

This contribute has got as object the role of schools and the strategies which teachers and school managers should use to start a serious course of education to the reading which are different from the sporadic activities of promotion itself, which are always useful, but noway functional to transform our pupils to readers for the life long, and to offer them some skills capable to take them a deep understanding of a text.

We will tell how we were able to make pupils of a comprehensive institute of Altofonte, a small country land, in province of Palermo, fond of reading.

Classrooms are full of potential readers and the school must to employ all the capable strategies to transform their reading into a personal art.