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Whether a child loves to read predicts their academic success more strongly than family income or parents’ education. That’s how high the stakes are.

And yet, schools have built the perfect system for making kids hate reading.

Take Shakespeare and the so-called literary canon. Teachers hand students a 400-year-old text in archaic English and demand: “Read this. Analyze the symbolism and foreshadowing. Appreciate its genius like I do.”

If you wanted to design an experiment to kill the joy of reading, that’s it.

The problem is that this approach fundamentally misunderstands adolescent development.

Montessori observed that teenagers are driven by identity, independence, and authenticity.

Schools counter with rigid reading lists and forced hunts for literary devices.

The mismatch could not be starker.

Not reading = less success

But here’s what makes this tragedy even worse.

Reading isn’t just about appreciating books. 

The research paints a stark picture of what’s really at stake. 

Students who read frequently don’t just do better in English class. They:

• outperform their peers across all subjects, including math and science.
• are more likely to graduate college, earn higher incomes throughout their lives
• participate more actively in civic life through voting and community engagement

Perhaps most striking is this: reading engagement predicts academic success better than family income or parents’ education. 

A student from a low-income family who reads avidly is more likely to succeed academically than a student who doesn’t read for pleasure. 

When we kill the joy of reading through compulsion, we’re not just failing to help but actively sabotaging long-term success.

Motivation matters

The magnitude of this impact becomes clear when we look at the motivation gap. 

Studies show that motivated readers spend 300% more time reading than unmotivated ones (Wigfield and Guthrie, 1997)

Decades of research confirm this.

Cunningham and Stanovich tracked students over 10 years and found that early differences in reading volume snowball into huge gaps in vocabulary, knowledge, and writing ability.

By high school, reading engagement isn’t just a predictor of English grades but a predictor of success across nearly every subject.

Instead, could we bribe kids into reading more?

Harvard economist Roland Fryer tried by spending $9.4 million in cash rewards.

The result?

Zero impact.

In some cases, scores fell.

You can’t pay someone to fall in love with books any more than you can pay them to fall in love with a person.

The key insight that the education system keeps missing is that intrinsic motivation is everything. 

Students who read only for external rewards, i.e., grades, points, pizza parties, etc don’t develop the same depth of engagement or comprehension as those who read for internal reasons like interest and enjoyment.

In fact, research shows that external rewards can actually decrease intrinsic motivation.

In fact, giving students what John Taylor Gatto calls ‘trinkets of subordination’ (grades, points, etc) just teaches kids that reading is a chore that requires coercion. It is not an inherently rewarding or enjoyable activity.

The costs of this approach extends far beyond the classroom. 

In an increasingly knowledge-based economy, reading proficiency is tightly linked to economic opportunity and social mobility. Employers consistently rank reading comprehension and related literacy skills among their most valued employee attributes. 

So when we fail to nurture genuine engagement with reading, we’re limiting our students’ future prospects in profound ways.

So how do we build better readers?

Like many things in education, there is research that lays out some clear principles on how to foster engagement and a love of reading.

And like many things in education, our schools choose to ignore the evidence.

so what are those principles?

Choice is oxygen

When students have autonomy in selecting their reading material, their motivation and comprehension both increase dramatically. This should not be a revelation.

We’re all more invested in activities where we feel we have agency. During adolescence especially, when young people are developing their sense of independence, imposed reading lists often trigger automatic resistance.

Relevance is fuel

Students engage deeply with texts that connect to their lives and interests. This doesn’t mean we should only let them read about TikTok and video games. But we need to help them see how literature can speak to their actual concerns and experiences. A teenager struggling with identity and belonging might connect powerfully with a book where the characters resemble him and the challenges he is encountering.

Abut again, agency is important. This doesn’t happen if it’s forced on them as a mandatory assignment to be dissected for symbolism.

Reading is social

When students have opportunities to discuss books with peers, share recommendations, and engage in genuine dialogue about what they’re reading, it transforms the experience from a solitary chore into a communal exploration. The most successful reading programs create what researchers call “communities of readers.”

Build stamina like a muscle

Many students who appear “unmotivated” simply haven’t built up the capacity for sustained reading. Starting with shorter reading periods and slowly extending them, while letting students choose engaging material at their level, helps develop this crucial ability.

Model authentic excitement

When teachers and parents share their genuine excitement about books, discuss what they’re reading, and visibly value reading as an activity, it sends a powerful message. Kids are remarkably good at detecting what adults actually value versus what we claim to value.

The cruel irony is that our current approach achieves the opposite of its intended effect.

In trying to ensure students read “important” literature, we make them associate reading with tedium, task compliance and reduced independence. 

In attempting to teach appreciation for great works, we create resistance and resentment.

In seeking to develop lifelong readers, we instead teach many students that reading is something you do only when forced.

The path forward

There’s a better way. 

But it requires us to trust young people more.

And control them less. 

A teenager devouring 800 pages of manga is better off than one faking their way through 8 pages of Shakespeare.

It means creating environments that nurture natural curiosity rather than imposing our adult notions of what books “should” be read because we had to or because some intellectuals deemed them important.

The stakes are too high to get this wrong. 

In an increasingly complex world, the ability to read deeply and with engagement isn’t just about literary appreciation, it is about developing the capacity for sustained thought, critical analysis, and empathy.

These are skills our young people desperately need.

But they’ll only develop them if we stop trying to force feed literature and instead focus on nurturing genuine engagement with reading.

Let’s stop making reading something we inflict on students.

As with many things in education, the research shows us how.

The question is whether we, the adults, have the wisdom, courage and humility to change our approach.

Perhaps Shakespeare himself, so often wielded as a weapon of compulsory reading, offers us the wisest counsel:

“To thine own self be true.”

When we trust young readers to follow their own reading interests, passions, and developmental needs, they’re far more likely to discover the deep joy and power of reading. And to get the outcomes that come from being a reader.

The alternative isn’t just ineffective,

It’ll be a tragedy worthy of Shakespeare himself.

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Notes:

I shared some early thinking/ideas on Shakespeare, reading and schools on LinkedIn. There were lots of comments that boiled down to “I like Shakespeare (or my kids did) and I can’t imagine anyone else couldn’t”

This is the false consensus effect in action, i.e., individuals overestimate the degree to which their personal opinions, beliefs, preferences, or experiences are shared by others.

The reality as the comments on LinkedIn highlight is people tend to use their own viewpoint as a reference point because it is most familiar.

If you talk to students in the typical government school or even most private schools as I’m doing, and you’ll hear a very different view.

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If you read this far, some related essays you’ll also like:

1. The Great Disengagement: America’s students have checked out
2. Beyond grades: Why measuring learning kills it
3. Degrees of deception: How America’s universities became debt factories
4. Bread, circuses and education
5. The School of Entrepreneuring
6. From myth to measurement: Rethinking US News & World Report College Rankings
7. The perverse incentives driving America’s government schools
8. The endless ladder
9. Students are solving the wrong problems
10. Your kids grades are bullshit
11. Ghost nonprofits and the manufacturing of virtue