ABSTRACT
If reading is a natural activity, then literacy education should obviously center on aspects of reading that are most natural to us. The most natural activity for human beings is to engage in interesting experience, the absence of which leads to boredom and withdrawal. But experience is not a topic that has much currency in education, except for the absurd suggestion that some students don’t do as well as others because they haven’t had many experiences. Instead the focus is on the information students are supposed to acquire. And the deliberate acquisition of information is not a particularly natural activity. People usually accumulate information without trying, in the course of engaging in interesting experiences. The interest is always in the experience, rather than in the information. The intentional acquisition of information, especially at the arbitrary behest of others, is one of the most tedious and unnatural activities anyone can engage in.
