 I'm betting you've been taught how to read words and how to read sentences. It's one thing to ask yourself whether you know how to read, and it's another thing to ask yourself whether you know how to read well. So tell me if this sounds familiar. You sit down to read. You read from the first sentence to the last. At the end of the paragraph you pause, you write a dash mark on your notes, and you try to summarize the main idea of the paragraph, usually in about a single sentence, and then you move on to the next paragraph. After about a page and a half of reading, you're bored. You don't know what you're reading. You don't know what the point is. You're frustrated. You're tired, and at least some of the time you fall asleep, walk away, or simply watch Netflix instead. Before a test you try to cram all those little dash marks inside your head, and you do this about an hour and a half before the test. You do your best to repeat or to simply regurgitate, which you hastily try to memorize, and by the next day you completely forgot what you just hastily memorized. You do this for every test, and at the end of the semester you ask, what the heck did I just pay all that money for to learn? Well, if this sounds even remotely familiar, then you probably have at least a little something to learn about reading. Now, you know, one of my Adlers how to read a book is just the classic source for this sort of instruction, and the series of videos will cover his book chapter by chapter. Now, you know, I think I do a pretty good job with videos, but it's just not a replacement, right? If you really want to learn how to do this and learn how to do it, well, get the book. When Adler wrote how to read a book, he wasn't trying to be insulting. The only thing that he's suggesting is that there's a big difference between being able to read words off the page and knowing how to comprehend. Now, the art of reading is more than just being able to recognize words on a page. It's comprehension, and like most things worth knowing how to do, comprehension is a set of skills. And skills are not something that you're born with. You have to learn these skills. The first step is to know the difference between active reading and passive reading. The extreme of passive reading is reading while expecting the text to do all the work, just like popular fiction. Popular fiction does not demand a great deal of you. It's the burden of the author to entertain whatever happens in the text is supposed to grab the reader. If a piece of popular fiction doesn't do this, the reader is not at fault. The author has failed to do the work. The extreme of active reading is in the other direction. The reader is expected to come to the text prepared to ask questions, to prepare to find the answers to the questions even when they're not listed verbatim in the text, and to do a fair amount of work. With active reading, if there's a question the reader has, it's the burden of the reader to answer it. If the author has a point, the author must present the point clearly, but the burden of comprehension is on the reader. All the authors required to do is to present the material in a clearly defined and coherent manner. Now this characterization presents the extremes and rarely describes any actual book, but it does illustrate the extremes pretty well. When you read, when you actively read, you read in order to comprehend. Now this comprehension requires work, and the author does not and cannot do all the work. You've got to do some yourself. To illustrate this idea of active reading, Adler uses the analogy of playing catch. A completely passive catcher does little, if anything, to receive the ball. Consequently, it's really not the pitcher's fault, and the catcher doesn't catch it. An active catcher has to move, watch, and anticipate in order to catch that ball. Of course, there's the burden on the pitcher to throw the ball to the right location at the right time, but the catcher must do a fair amount of work. Well, active reading is like this. When you actively read, you must ask questions from the text or about the text, and you must answer those questions based upon what's in the text. Now, you know, kind of a word of caution here, just because you're looking in the text for the answer does not mean you're going to find it in the text verbatim. You're going to have to do some work on your own to answer that question yourself. I'm wondering what sorts of questions you're supposed to ask while you're reading. Now, the later chapters of the book and the later videos in this series will go into, well, explain these questions in more detail. For now, let's just simply look at the purpose, the purpose behind these questions. Chances are, if you pick up a newspaper or read an article off of a news site, you're capable of comprehending what is given in that article. Most articles simply report on events that have occurred. You understand enough of these events in order to understand the article. These events can include traffic reports, charity events, crime reports, political rallies, or the weather. This is reading for information. You understand as much as needed to acquire the information. You understand what is the case. Let's consider only one kind of report, say the weather. You understand what it means to rain. Water falls from the sky and you need an umbrella. To understand that, it rains is one thing. To understand why it rains or even why the weather whether a person reports or predicts rain is another. I'd wager that most people watching this video would not know how to read a radar image or a barometer gauge or understand how humidity interacts with temperature and atmospheric pressure to produce rain. But this is what it means to understand why it rains or even why the forecaster predicts rain. When you read for information, you're reading to figure out what is the case. When you read for understanding, you're reading to figure out why it's the case. And the questions you'll be taught how to ask are designed to help you discover why it's the case so that you read to find to increase understanding. Adler gives us this following definition for reading. Thus we can roughly define what we mean by the art of reading as follows. The process whereby a mind with nothing to operate on but the symbols of the readable matter and with no help from the outside elevates itself by the power of its own operations. The mind passes from understanding less to understanding more. The skilled operations that causes to happen are the various acts that constitute the art of reading. This elevation that Adler is talking about is comprehension. By teaching you how to read, Adler is hoping to teach you how to comprehend, how to understand the world and why it is the way it is.