Reading, flow, and the Aristotelian Principle

From Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment. A very intriguing and rigorous discussion of what constitutes accomplishment, how do we measure it, and how do we explain it.

Here is Murray's discussion and a graphic he has adapted from work by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. All on pages 385-389. This Aristotelian Principle is very pertinent to the process of learning to read (see Growing a Reading Culture): parents and teachers are constantly having to navigate between the shoals of apathy, the whitewaters of anxiety and the reefs of boredom. The payoff, of course, is immense - the state of flow where a child is completely immersed in the story, oblivious to time and external reality. It is a delicate balancing act of trying to match a child's reading skills with the challenge of a particular text, made even more difficult given that a child's reading skills and interests stall and accelerate so unevenly.

I proceed from the view that accomplishment in the arts and sciences is one manifestation of a characteristic of human nature discussed at length by Aristotle in books seven and ten of the Nichomachean Ethics. A leading topic in those books is the meaning of pleasure in human life. The core sentence for our purposes: "Life is an activity, and each man actively exercises his favorite faculties upon the objects he loves most." Philosopher John Rawls distilled the sense of Aristotle's discussion into what he labeled the Aristotelian principle, which Rawls stated as follows:

Other things being equal, human beings enjoy the exercise of their realized capacities (their innate or trained abilities), and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its complexity.

I add the italics to signify the importance of this statement. If it is not true, little of the rest of my explanation of what ignites excellence in human accomplishment hangs together. If it is true, elements of the explanation approach the self evident. Rawls continues:

The intuitive idea here is that human beings take more pleasure in doing something as they become more proficient at it, and of two activities they do equally well, they prefer the one calling on a larger repertoire of more intricate and subtle discriminations. For example, chess is a more complicated and subtle game than checkers, and algebra is more intricate than elementary arithmetic. Thus the principle says that someone who can do both generally prefers playing chess to playing checkers, and that he would rather study algebra than arithmetic.

Here is the graphic Murray uses.

The concept of flow is one of the principle extrinsic motivations that help sustain children through the often times bumpy ride of learning to read and then becoming an habitual and enthusiastic reader. I believe this statement of the Aristotelian Principle also underpins three of the five core recommendations made in Growing a Reading Culture, to wit - Make many books available (variety), give children the power of choosing which books to read, and read to them. All three facilitate the journey to Flow.

This principle also illuminates two observed traits of children reading. The first observation is that, left to their own devices, children will oscillate between easy and familiar texts and more challenging books - they are simply oscillating along that line from Apathy to Flow; enjoying easier texts with which they are familiar but not so easy that they become bored, then shifting over to books that challenge and stretch them, just as the principle predicts.

The second observed feature of children becoming habitual and enthusiastic readers is that, again left to their own devices and in an environment rich in books from which they can choose, no matter to what extent they indulge in "easier" or "lower quality" books, they do and will evolve towards better books because they "enjoy the exercise of their realized capacities (their innate or trained abilities), and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its complexity."