[SketchySeaBeast]

Reading that's strictly there because you have to isn't going to engender a love of reading, it's going to smother it. I also doubt that it'll be effective at teaching the skill of reading - it'll be works that ignored from those who don't care to do it.

I read because I loved it and was exposed to it at a young age from home, not because school required me to read.

[bunderbunder]

For that matter, it's not that I'm opposed to asking the kids to spend time reading. It's an excess of assigned reading as homework that seems worrisome to me, precisely because it might mean that the only exposure some kids get to reading is a bunch of crap busywork reading. As soon as you start regimenting a thing like this, you suck all the joy out of it.

What if, instead, schools simply set aside a chunk of time out of the school day for reading, maybe 15 minutes, maybe 30, and leave it entirely up to the individual kids to decide what it is that they read?