I teach English as an act of rebellion. Against the deification of STEM. Against utilitarianism. Against consumerism. Against Capitalism.

It is not “useful” to read novels or poems or stories or even (most of the time) essays and other nonfiction:

“Reading is not profitable; it doesn’t teach you any transferable skills or offer any networking opportunities. On the contrary, it is an antisocial activity in the most concrete sense: To do it you have to be alone, or else pretend you’re alone by tuning out other people. Reading teaches you to be more interested in what’s going on inside your head than in the real world.”

(Adam Kirsch, “Reading Is a Vice”)

I am against those who want to sell you things and control your attention for money and power. Reading books is one of the ways we say, “I’m not going to optimize. I’m going to be slow and self-serving. I’m going to value my pleasure over your profit.”

Yes, there is a publishing market, but it’s more than just New York publishers or Amazon. Those of us who read books buy them used, we trade, we go to the library. We buy from small presses, independent presses, self-publishers. It’s a business, sure, but readers have a way of circumventing the business and consumerism if we want. We have all the old books to read, if we want. One could spend a lifetime only reading the old books.

There is homework–math problems, history notes, science reading–but then there is reading a chapter from a novel. There is reading a poem and writing one of your own. In the most narrow sense, if one does these at home as assigned by a teacher, then they are homework. But reading a novel is a pleasurable act. Reading poetry is leisure. We bristle when something is assigned; we suddenly don’t want to do it. But if we take a few moments to reconsider, we realize that reading is not work. Fiction, stories, language, poetry: these are a chance to be alone, to get inside one’s own head, to fight back against the world. All it takes is a shift in mindset to discover that this “homework” is really an idle pleasure.

Reading is idling, the opposite of work.

Which means, every chance a student has to read a book, she gets to break free from a work-obsessed, profit-obsessed, productivity-obsessed, speed-obsessed world.

I’m not interested in “21st century skills,” a buzz word for managers and corporations. I’m not in the classroom to teach students how to prompt machines. I’m there to read books, to share the stories and language I think are beautiful, good, and true. I’m there to point to things I like and let students discover and point to things they like. We spend our time reading books, talking about books, writing about and in response to books. I can’t think of a better act of rebellion against the machine-driven, inhumane world that would reduce our lives to money and influence.

Sometimes students don’t see the “point” in all this reading. But that’s because there really isn’t one. Not in the utilitarian sense. Not in a “How will this help me when I’m an engineer or a doctor?” sense. It won’t help you in engineering and doctoring. It will only make life better, make you escape the confines of defining yourself purely as “engineer” or “doctor,” make you pay attention to your own mind and what’s going on inside besides worrying about which rung of the ladder next needs to be climbed.

That can be an uncomfortable place to sit for some students. To do a thing for pleasure–in school!–is incomprehensible. Even we English teachers have to church up what we do with standards and data and metrics and all the rest of it.

But really, what we do–what I hope to do–is share a space with young people so they have time and materials to read. My little rebellion. My first principle of idling. My useless, antisocial, indulgent vice.