Should reading be such hard work?

“Perfect Peter has just finished The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” says his mother. “He taught himself to read over the holidays and now he can’t stop.” Perfect Peter is only four. He is also an exception. Teaching children to read and inspiring them with a love of books takes time and patience—something most of us lack.

It takes hours of M for Maisy Mountain, following Floppy the dog through the Oxford Reading Tree series and renditions of The Tiger who Came to Tea. No wonder one fifth of our children in the United Kingdom leave school unable to read and a quarter of the young haven’t read a book in the past year. For many hard-pressed families and schools, reading has become too much like hard work. Which explains why the government has become obsessed with encouraging everyone to pick up a book again.

But does it matter? Isn’t an obsession with books just an out-of-date, middle-class hang-up? Read this opinion piece at Telegraph.co.UK.