This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
The educator Sukhomlinsky said that students’ intellectual development depends on good reading ability; whoever is not good at reading is not good at thinking. And a child who does not read is a potential underachiever in learning.
So why is reading so important for children, and what necessary connection exists between reading and children’s intellectual development?
The educator Sukhomlinsky stated: 30 years of experience have convinced me that students’ intellectual development depends on good reading ability.”
He pointed out the harm of a lack of reading: “Why do some children who are clever and bright in childhood become slow-witted in adolescence? Because they don’t know how to read!”
By contrast, “some students have very little homework, yet their academic results are not bad. This is often because they have relatively good reading ability. And good reading ability in turn promotes the development of intellectual talent.”
“Students who read nothing but their textbooks have a very superficial grasp of what they learn in class, and they shift the whole burden onto homework. Because the homework burden is too heavy, they have no time to read scientific books and periodicals, and so a vicious circle forms.”
Modern psychology has done much research confirming this. From the learning theories of leading psychologists such as Piaget, Bruner and Ausubel, we can see two key points: first, the development of thinking is closely related to the development of the language system; second, learning new knowledge depends on one’s existing intellectual background.
“Reading” is an activity mediated by linguistic symbols, rich in content that goes beyond real life. It allows the reader’s “language system” to develop better and at the same time makes his “intellectual background” richer, so that his ability to think and to learn new knowledge becomes stronger.
Books are a magic wand that brings a child a kind of magic in learning and can raise his intelligence to a higher level. A child who loves reading is a child touched by the magic wand. How lucky he is!
2 In primary school and even lower secondary school, there are no absolutely good grades
In primary school and even in the lower years of secondary school, children can get good grades by cleverness or hard work alone; but without reading as a foundation, the higher the grade, the more they will find themselves out of their depth.
Several very distressed parents said that their children originally had good grades and studied hard, but worryingly, the children’s performance in their studies became less and less satisfactory. Whenever this happens, if you ask about the children’s extracurricular reading from childhood on, the result is as expected: these children have basically lacked extracurricular reading. In contrast are other children whose grades may not have been outstanding when small, but who, because they had good extracurricular reading, were able to overtake others later; when they really want to study, their potential is unstoppable.
In primary school and even lower secondary school, there is no real academic backwardness and no absolute excellence in grades; everything is reversible. The magical power that brings about the reversal is extracurricular reading. It really is like a magic wand, showing more and more incredible power.
3 Why do some children’s grades get worse and worse?
People easily see the surface of children’s changes: when some children like studying more and more and their grades get better and better, people think the children have grown up and become sensible, and are gratified; when other children like studying less and less and their grades get worse and worse, people wonder why the children are becoming less and less sensible and less and less self-disciplined. People rarely see a very important cause behind these appearances, namely extracurricular reading.
Children who read a lot have strong learning ability. When they consciously and actively set about learning, their rich language and intellectual background come to their aid; their good learning ability means that as long as they make an effort they get a sense of achievement, and this sense of achievement in turn spurs them to learn more actively. Children who read little, by contrast, have weak learning ability because of their meagre language and intellectual background. Faced with increasingly difficult knowledge and increasing competition, they more often feel out of their depth; the more frustration they feel, the less confident they become, and the less interested in learning.
People cannot hold out for long on willpower and reason alone; they soon show a steady decline and begin, consciously or unconsciously, to avoid studying. This may be what parents perceive as their child “becoming less sensible the older he gets, and liking study less and less.”
To make their children clever and good at studying, parents are doing everything they can. The most important means of intellectual enlightenment is reading. It is a “multiplying” means that can make a child’s intelligence increase geometrically.
The children are already busy enough coping with school courses; getting good grades in exams is what matters most; reading extracurricular books wastes time and affects studies, so it is not worth it. Such thinking is like someone saying: I’m in a hurry to get from Harbin to Guangzhou for a meeting, how do I have time to wait four hours for a plane? The train is about to leave, I must hurry and take the train. At first hearing it seems to make sense, but in fact it is completely wrong.
When a handful of identical seeds is sown in the field, and some get the right amount of water and plenty of sunshine while others are both parched and deprived of sun, the final harvests will differ greatly.
Reading is the water and sunshine of wisdom, which makes children grow up healthy and strong.
4 Don’t let your child become a potential underachiever
The most important technical means of developing and shaping intelligence after birth is reading; this has been confirmed by modern psychological research.
First, people think in language. And the best way to acquire good language is reading.
Second, learning new knowledge depends on existing background knowledge. Any reading can broaden a person’s horizons and give him knowledge beyond the scope of daily life; the richer a person’s background knowledge, the more easily he absorbs new knowledge.
The educator Sukhomlinsky said: “A child who does not read is a potential underachiever in learning.” This is an important conclusion he reached after many years of research and observation at the front line of teaching.
Cultivating a child’s interest in reading is the best and simplest way to make his intelligence grow not just by addition but by multiplication. If your child develops an interest in reading from an early age and reads widely as he grows up, then the parents’ intellectual enlightenment of the child is not merely adequate but enviable.
5 How do we explain the Han Hans?
Among primary and secondary school students there is a phenomenon called “lopsided learning” that seems to challenge the relationship between reading and learning ability.
This issue should be understood as follows: there are many reasons why he did not like mathematics and science subjects; teachers, family, natural aptitude, classmates and so on could all be influencing factors. Reading is of course not powerful enough to solve every problem and remedy every shortcoming. But one thing is certain: his poor grades in science were definitely not caused by reading. Fortunately such children like reading; whether or not they go to university, they are intelligent and can achieve corresponding success. Seen this way, reading is still a fortunate thing for them.
The other type is a preference for mathematics, physics and chemistry. Some, especially boys, have very good grades in maths and science subjects but are not interested in humanities subjects such as Chinese and English, and rarely read.
One mother of a lower secondary student was even a little smug that her child was good at maths and physics and particularly disliked Chinese, perhaps thinking this showed her child was clever. But if her child merely disliked the Chinese course itself while having read many extracurricular books, she could be proud, as it shows the child’s potential is still great. If, however, the child has always lacked reading and his dislike of Chinese is based on long-standing poor language ability, that is a rather troublesome matter, and I fear that one day the maths and science subjects will be dragged down too.
From whatever angle, reading is important; it brings nothing but help and fulfilment to children’s learning.
