Teachers Who Don't Read Are Teaching the Wrong Lesson: The Case for Reading

Why Books Still Matter in a World That Has Stopped Turning Pages

Photo by Michał Parzuchowski on Unsplash

I was four years old when Dick and Jane changed everything for me.

I don’t remember learning to read. What I remember is the feeling of being hooked. That moment when black marks on a white page stopped being symbols and started being a world. By the time I hit junior high, I was reading more than 200 books a year across Grades 7, 8, and 9. The Hardy Boys. Nancy Drew. Every mystery I could get my hands on. Then in high school, Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey pulled me into the American West: horses, dust, consequence, honour. I wasn’t escaping my life so much as discovering that other lives existed, that human experience was wider and stranger and more textured than anything my small corner of the world could show me.

Part of what made that possible was the absence of television in our house. I’m not romanticizing deprivation. I’m noting a simple truth: when there’s nothing competing for your attention, a book fills the silence completely.

Then I got a part-time job after school, and the numbers dropped. Life, as it always does, made competing demands. That pattern has followed me into adulthood. I still aim for 75 books a year. I use audiobooks when I’m driving. I’ve read on Kindle. I’ve used every format available because I refuse to let the format become the barrier. But I’ll admit what most readers eventually admit: there is something about a physical book, the weight of it, the ability to flip back three pages because something clicked, the margin note in your own handwriting, that no screen has fully replicated for me.

I share all of this because I want to talk about what reading actually does, and why I’m worried we are quietly deciding, as a culture, that it no longer needs to be taught with the same urgency we once gave it.

What a Book Does That a Summary Cannot

Reading a full novel is not the same cognitive act as reading excerpts, summaries, or even very long articles. The difference is not sentimental. It is structural.

A novel requires sustained attention across time. The reader must hold characters, timelines, cause-and-effect chains, and emotional arcs in working memory across days or weeks. This is not passive reception. It is an ongoing act of mental construction. The brain is building a model of a world that does not exist, populated by people who have never lived, in situations the reader has never encountered. That process, extended, effortful, imaginative, is one of the most comprehensive cognitive workouts available to a human being at any age.

Excerpts have value. I use them in my classroom to support specific outcomes. But an excerpt is a photograph. A novel is the trip. You can show a student a photograph of the Rockies and they will understand that mountains are large. They will not understand what it feels like to be small.

The research on this is not subtle. Extended reading builds vocabulary in context, which is the only way vocabulary genuinely sticks. It builds syntactic flexibility, the ability to process complex, layered sentence structures, which transfers directly to writing quality. It builds empathy, because fiction in particular forces the reader to inhabit a perspective that is not their own for an extended period. And it builds the capacity for sustained focus, which is the skill most under attack in the current attention economy.

The Digital Age Has Not Replaced Reading. It Has Replaced Practice.

I am not anti-technology. I want to be precise about what I am saying.

The problem is not that students have phones. The problem is that phones and screens generally train attention toward short, high-stimulation, algorithmically optimized content. The reward cycle is fast. The cognitive demand is low. The brain adapts. And when that same brain is asked to sit with a novel for forty minutes, following a plot that does not resolve in the next ninety seconds, it registers the experience as uncomfortable.

That discomfort is not a signal to stop. It is a signal that something real is happening.

We are now beginning to see what happens to a generation that reads less. Writing quality declines not because students are less intelligent, but because they have encountered fewer complex sentences and therefore cannot construct them. Comprehension of extended argument weakens. The ability to follow a sustained line of reasoning, in a court document, a contract, a piece of legislation, a medical explanation, weakens with it. These are not trivial losses.

AI will not solve this. If anything, AI accelerates the problem. When a student can generate a summary of a novel in thirty seconds, the temptation to substitute that summary for the experience of reading it is enormous. But the summary cannot give them what the reading gives them. The summary is the photograph again. The reading is the trip.

If You Want Students to Read, You Have to Read

This is the part that lands hardest when I say it to teachers, and I say it often.

I have listened to educators, good, dedicated, skilled educators, admit that they have not read a book in years. They are busy. They are exhausted. The demands on teachers have multiplied while the hours in a day have not. I understand all of that completely.

And yet.

Students are extraordinarily good at detecting what adults actually value versus what adults say they value. If reading is something we assign but do not do, they will understand the message beneath the message: this is a task, not a practice. This is something you perform for school, not something you carry into your life.

I recently finished reading a fantasy series: Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series, followed by Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing series. They are not the books I would have predicted finding myself absorbed by. They surprised me. Maas built a world so vivid and internally consistent that I found myself genuinely grieving when arcs closed. Yarros captured something true about loyalty and courage inside a dragon mythology that should have felt absurd but didn’t. Neither of these books is without challenging content. Both include explicit scenes that I did not anticipate going in. I adjusted. I kept reading. Because the world they built was worth inhabiting, and I am a reader, and readers finish books.

If reading is something we assign but do not do, students will understand the message beneath the message: this is a task, not a practice.

When I talk about those books with students, casually, in passing, the way you mention something you actually care about, the response is immediate. They want to know what I thought. They want to tell me what they thought. The conversation is different from any conversation prompted by an assignment.

That is the point. That is the entire point.

What This Asks of Schools

Reading full novels aloud in class still matters. Home reading programs still matter. Libraries still matter. The quiet, low-stakes invitation to disappear into a book, without a quiz waiting at the end, without a graphic organizer to complete, still matters.

Students need to experience reading as something that happens to you, not just something you do to demonstrate competency.

They need to feel what it is to be genuinely lost in a story. To read past their bedtime. To resent an interruption because the chapter is not finished. To be changed, in some small or large way, by an account of a life they did not live.

Students need to experience reading as something that happens to you, not just something you do to demonstrate competency.

That experience does not happen with excerpts. It does not happen with summaries. It does not happen when the teacher has not read a book since the last professional development day on literacy strategies.

It happens with books. Whole books. Given time. Modelled by adults who mean it.

I have been a reader since I was four years old. I intend to keep reading until I cannot. The least I can do is make sure the students who come through my school understand why.

Vince Hill is a school principal in Alberta with over 35 years in education. He writes about teaching, learning, and the life of a rural school.