Desi Anwar: A Reading Habit
I was invited as a guest speaker at a national seminar on library and archives that a university in Bogor was holding the other day, and quite a few of the librarians present in the audience asked me — given the poor reading habits of children in Indonesia — what should be done to encourage them to read more. A reading habit after all, is essential in raising well-informed individuals and yet, it's difficult to get the children to develop a love for books, especially with the presence of television, video games, the Internet and other distractions.
This question made me pause for thoughts. As far as I know children have a natural love for reading and would reach out for books when they see them. Just try to separate a child from her favorite book or comic or make her put her book down so she could eat dinner! My own earliest childhood memory is always having reading material in my hand, wherever I went. After all, a book is a wonderful gateway to the rich world of imagination and adventures, arousing a child's curiosity and stimulating intelligence.
Reading is a pleasant pursuit that hardly needs encouragement. Otherwise J.K. Rowling would not be the successful children's writer that she has been for the last decade, selling millions of copies of the Harry Potter series worldwide. I do not believe the problem lies with the children.
In turn, I asked the audience how many among them actually read books themselves, have a bookshelf at home, give their children books as presents and read them bedtime stories. Surprisingly enough, very few put their hands up. The problem then, is not the children's lack of interest in reading, but in the sorry fact that most Indonesian children are brought up in an environment that has little interest in reading and that provides them very little access to books.
I myself was fortunate enough to be brought up surrounded by books as my father was a bookworm to say the least, while my mother was a librarian who was always bringing piles of books home. We as children would fight for them as we would for toys or sweets.
However, the majority of Indonesians have very limited access to books. There are very few public libraries near where they live. Books are relatively expensive to buy and these days, the ubiquitous television and the increasingly affordable video, online games and social media are also competing for everybody's time and attention.
In any case, we're still more or less confined to the oral tradition, preferring chats and hanging out talking with friends to the solitary activity of picking up a book and be lost in our own world. This is probably why the social media and chat applications are a big thing in Indonesia, even as the country's reading habit ranks somewhere near the bottom compared to the rest of the world, on par with Suriname and Bahrain.
Moreover, the education system does not actually encourage reading. At school, children are taught the names of Indonesian authors, the titles of the books and when they were written without being told to actually read the books themselves so they could enjoy the stories and discuss them. Perhaps the schools don't have them in their library as they're too expensive to acquire. Perhaps the teachers haven't read the books themselves.
Meanwhile, reading infrastructure, such as libraries, is often poorly stocked and maintained, not to mention limited in number due to lack of funds and inefficient management.
School children's experience of reading, therefore, is more inclined to be associated with carrying out tedious tasks and assignments than exploring how a good novel is crafted, how beautiful sentences are written and what makes a book a joy to read as well as the depth of thinking behind the writing. How could the country expect children to develop a good reading habit when the parents, the teachers and the policy makers don't even like to read?
Desi Anwar is a senior anchor at Metro TV. She can be reached at desianwar.com or dailyavocado.net.
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