All the well intended educational and legislative efforts to ensure graduates of Minnesota schools can read may address the wrong problem and need to be refocused. The problem is not that students don't know how to read but that they don't want to read and, so, our task is to lead them into a desire to read.

Minnesota fiction writer Will Weaver gave me a term for a factor I have observed for several years but resisted believing because of what it means for the future of our youth. Weaver was the principal presenter at a conference last month on regional literature at Minnesota State University, Mankato where I read a paper. He said the problem he finds is not that students are illiterate but what he calls "aliterate" (read, not ill-literate but a-literate).

He explained: "It's not that they can't read, but that they don't want to."

It was a passing remark in a wide-ranging discourse, and he didn't elaborate. However, from reaction of teachers and professors in the audience, I sense he neither needed to nor did he need to argue his point.

Immediately, the pre-television generation jumps on it as the culprit.

Indeed it is culpable in the extreme. But ultimately, it is consumers who bear the guilt, inasmuch as the industry irresponsibly caters to consumer demand.

Add video movies and games, playboys, computer games, and a growing hoard of electronic and digital devices, by which everything is done for the consumer and then thrown in their faces. The consumer -- not just youth, but the adults who set a bad example -- become passive drones conditioned and victimized into uncritical non-readers.

When I taught writing and literature in a local community college, I recognized how uninterested students were in reading. They -- with a modicum of much appreciated exceptions -- read almost nothing they weren't required to read. They read as little of that as they could get away with and none of it effectively. When they did read discretionary material, the best was worthless and much was unmitigated trash.

The students who enrolled in elective literature courses read a good deal more willingly than those in the required writing classes. The latter wouldn't even read the course syllabus and were offended when I gave a quiz on it at the beginning of the second class session. The shock sustained by the literature students is Stephen King and Harold Robbins weren't in the assigned reading.

When movies are made from great literature, the movie and television industries eviscerate them into pabulum easily swallowed with minimal disturbance to the brain. It is no surprise, then, that a society of non-readers will believe anything shown to it on television "news." They are tricked into thinking they have seen it with their "own eyes," but we see only what is crafted for popular consumption.

The usual run of technological media dull and eventually deaden the brain; genuine literature excites and energies it. Consequently, our youth expect academic classes to be theatrical performances that make it worth attending.

They will attend church only if a worship service has been bowdlerized into a night club act and religious and moral exhortations are diluted to feel-good nonsense.

Schools have, in fact, succeeded tolerably well in teaching students how to read. This is not what requires our attention. What they are obviously not doing is teaching them to want to read. I challenge schools to develop a strategy that will imbue students with a desire to read and a love of reading that will create a reading life.