In a time when reading seems increasingly surrounded by notifications, short videos, accumulated tasks, and immediate answers, defending its role in human development may sound, to some, like a nostalgic gesture. But it is precisely the opposite. In a scenario marked by speed, fragmentation, and constant pressure to react before reflecting, reading remains one of the most demanding (and most necessary) experiences for those who wish to understand the world without merely submitting to it.
According to Professor Ezequiel Theodoro da Silva, a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Education at Unicamp, critical reading begins precisely where simple decoding ends. Understanding a text, he affirms, is important, but it is not enough. The critical reader is one who goes beyond the surface, questions what they read, suspects its premises, perceives silences, identifies interests, and formulates their own position regarding what has been said. Instead of receiving the text as a closed piece, they begin to treat it as an object of dialogue.
The distinction seems simple, but it shifts the entire problem of reading. In many school contexts, reading is still associated with completing a task, a questionnaire, a test, the search for the "correct message." In these cases, reading tends to be emptied of meaning and converted into a mechanism of control. Ezequiel observes that, for a long time, school helped transform it into a "ritual of surveillance," in which the most important thing was not the reader's experience, but their ability to give the expected answer. The problem, he says, is that the opposite extreme doesn't solve the issue either. Forming readers doesn't just mean freeing up individual choices and trusting that immediate enjoyment will, by itself, lead to more complex paths.
In this sense, reading depends on rigorous mediation. It requires space for choice, but also the expansion of repertoire, the creation of contexts, and an approximation between the student's concrete experience and works that they might never seek out on their own. Forming readers, from this perspective, is precisely about taking them beyond what is already known. It is not about imposing texts as if managing obligations, nor about abdicating pedagogical responsibility in the name of comfortable spontaneity. It is about creating conditions so that the encounter with the text is, at the same time, free and demanding.
This requirement becomes even more important when considering that students do not arrive at school with the same reading histories. Some grew up in environments marked by the presence of books, conversations, readers, and familiarity with written language. Others had little or no access to this universe. Recognizing this inequality, observes Ezequiel, does not imply lowering intellectual demands, but rather building smarter and fairer paths so that everyone can advance. The democratization of reading is not achieved by downgrading schoolwork, but rather through a combination of access, diverse collections, institutional time for reading, vibrant libraries, and qualified mediation.
The challenge of attention in the age of screens.
This is where the figure of the teacher becomes fundamental. For Ezequiel, the teacher should be neither the authoritarian transmitter of ready-made interpretations nor the passive mediator who merely places the student before the text and expects everything to happen on its own. Their role is more complex. It is up to them to select texts, organize learning paths, contextualize works, provoke questions, listen to answers, challenge hasty readings, and broaden horizons. In other words, to sustain a rigorous space for dialogue. In a culture where distraction often prevails over concentration, the teacher remains a decisive presence to demonstrate, in practice, that reading is worthwhile.
In this context, the defense of literature takes on a special meaning. Instead of treating it as a cultural ornament or mere school content, Ezequiel insists on its unique power to broaden human experience. An informative text can instruct; literature, moreover, displaces. By confronting the reader with conflicts, ambiguities, pain, desires, and contradictions, it distances them from the commonplace, de-automatizes their gaze, and compels them to grapple with complexity. In times saturated with rapid information and automatic reactions, this engagement with the depth of the human experience is not a luxury: it is part of our very formation.
However, if reading is a space for elaboration, slowness, and confrontation, the present seems to work in the opposite direction. Ezequiel acknowledges that digital culture has profoundly altered the ecology of attention. Daily life has become permeated by constant interruptions, alternating focuses, uninterrupted stimuli, and fragmented forms of reading. This affects memory, concentration, and the willingness to remain engaged with more demanding texts. Deep reading, he reminds us, requires duration, rereading, coexistence with difficulty, and inner silence. Not surprisingly, it has become more difficult.
Nevertheless, the professor rejects simplistic explanations that scapegoat technology. The problem lies not only in the screens, but in the practices and logics they intensify. Therefore, the school's task is not to demonize the digital world, but to create counterpoints. Educating readers today also requires teaching an ethics of attention: knowing how to interrupt the flow, sustain concentration, tolerate slowness, return to the text, and mature interpretations. If the environment fosters distraction, the school needs to assert itself as a space for in-depth learning.
This diagnosis helps to escape two equally impoverishing commonplaces: that young people simply don't read anymore and that all reading in a digital environment is, in itself, a sign of cultural vitality. Young people do read, and a lot—captions, messages, comments, posts, images, various signs. What this doesn't automatically guarantee is the formation of readers capable of sustaining long reading, complex interpretation, and critical reflection. What is in crisis, argues Ezequiel, is not reading in general, but a certain way of reading: dense, continuous, demanding, formative. Recognizing this transformation without nostalgia and without naive adherence to the new is perhaps one of the most delicate tasks of contemporary education.
The same caution applies to the pedagogical use of platforms. Working with different genres and textual formats, including digital ones, is necessary. However, there is a difference between expanding repertoire and passively adapting to the logic of the market and engagement. When the school incorporates new formats to critically analyze them, compare them, and understand their effects, it expands the universe of reading. When it only chases after what is "trending," it submits to the logic of capturing attention and abdicates its formative role. Ezequiel's formulation is precise: the school should not ignore the platforms, but neither can it kneel before them.
Read, respond, produce your own words.
This critical stance inevitably involves the transition from reading to authorship. From this perspective, critical reading is only complete when the reader produces their own word in response to the word of another. Reading well implies responding, commenting, rewriting, arguing, relating, and problematizing. Whenever the school limits itself to demanding correct interpretation, it reduces the student to the condition of a passive recipient. When, on the contrary, it opens space for the student to formulate questions, write reviews, develop counterpoints, experiment with essays, and construct arguments, reading ceases to be controlled reception and becomes an act of authorship. Forming readers, in this sense, is also forming subjects capable of producing meaning.
If the classroom is one of the crucial places for this education, the library is another. Simone Lucas Gonçalves de Oliveira, director of the Prof. Joel Martins Library at the Faculty of Education, draws attention to the fact that libraries cannot be seen merely as spaces to support study or repositories of books. For her, they are places where ideas circulate and knowledge is created, environments where reading, culture, and art can contribute to the transformation of people. Their function is not limited to the preservation of written memory, although this role is also essential. The university library, says Simone, needs to be equally a learning laboratory, a space for mediation and democratization of access to knowledge.
Observation lends greater concreteness to the debate. If critical reading requires practical conditions to exist, these conditions include collections, spaces, investment, dialogue with teachers and students, and consistent mediation activities. Simone insists that a library that lives solely on shelves and book lending cannot sustain itself. It is necessary to "give life" to books: to promote reading clubs, fairs, film screenings, mediation activities, and experiences in which the public participates not only as users but as subjects of the formative process. At a time when reading is frequently associated with school or academic obligation, the library can help rebuild a more autonomous and meaningful relationship with books.
Library, public university and democratization of knowledge
This public dimension is especially important in a university like Unicamp. Guaranteeing democratic access to study materials, reading spaces, and the plural circulation of ideas is not an accessory function of university life, but part of its commitment to critical thinking. For students who have not always had broad access to cultural resources throughout their lives, the library can represent a decisive gateway—not only for keeping up with coursework, but also for reading experiences that broaden their horizons, spark questions, and strengthen their connection to the production of knowledge.
Reading, after all, doesn't magically emancipate. It emancipates when it ceases to be mere training, when it finds qualified mediation, when it opens itself to conflict and complexity, when it transforms into its own voice, and when it relies on institutions that make it possible. Amidst the rush, standardization, and incessant noise of the present, perhaps its deepest value lies precisely in this possibility: allowing someone to suspend automatism, examine what they read, question what they see, and refuse to passively accept the world as it presents itself.
That is why, for Ezequiel, forming readers remains an intellectual, pedagogical, and political task. Its effects don't always fit into spreadsheets, indexes, or reports. Often they are slow, discreet, almost invisible in the short term. Yet, they persist. And perhaps they are more necessary today than ever before.
