Education Quote by Beverly Cleary

Cleary isn’t pitching literacy as medicine you endure for your own good; she’s arguing that the whole sales job has been botched. “Should learn” reads like gentle instruction, but it’s also a quiet rebuke to the way schools often turn books into compliance. The sentence hinges on a contrast that every former student recognizes: reading as “pleasure” versus reading as “something that teachers make you do.” That last phrase is deliberately plain, almost childlike, and that’s the point. It mimics the resentful logic of kids who associate books with worksheets, quizzes, and the looming threat of being “behind.”

The subtext is less about individual taste than about power. When reading is framed as obligation, the authority of the teacher eclipses the agency of the child; the book becomes a gatekeeping tool rather than a doorway. Cleary’s own work - Ramona, Henry Huggins - thrived on the messy interior lives of ordinary kids, not on moral lessons delivered with a ruler. She built a career proving that children will read voluminously when the story respects their humor, boredom, jealousy, and small triumphs.

Context matters: Cleary came of age when libraries were lifelines and when children’s literature was still fighting for legitimacy as art rather than instruction. Her line anticipates today’s debates about “reading levels,” test-driven curricula, and the anxiety economy of parenting. It’s a reminder that the surest way to create lifelong readers isn’t to optimize them; it’s to let them fall in love, privately, with words.