Well, what if, as a child, every time you ate ice cream you had to do a report on it? Or if every time you had a cupcake, you had to do pushups? Now, what if you were given a test for every book you read in grade school? What if the test weren’t about the book’s essence, but more of a “gotcha” exercise to see if you really read it? Maybe you’d still love reading as an adult. Then again, when presented a book, maybe you’d turn and run.

I shudder to think how many young people we think we’ve encouraged to read have grown up to think, “I’m out of school. I don’t have to read anymore.”

That’s not the way it’s supposed to work. Education (as opposed to training) is supposed to impart love — the love of knowledge, the lusting for truth and beauty. And when it comes to reading — well, you are supposed to come out of the enterprise wanting to read like nothing else. But in our fixation on testing, standardization and punitively tinged “accountability,” often what happens is exactly the opposite of what we want.

When my youngest son was in elementary and middle school, the program Accelerated Reader (AR) caused my teeth to lose their enamel and him to lose his zest for reading. Compared to his bookworm brother, he was never a big reader. That’s the problem with AR if it is used as a hammer.

Few people involved in Texas schools need a description of AR. It assigns points to books and “rewards” students for completing them, relying on the aforementioned self-paced tests. Of course, not every school uses it in the same way. Some use AR simply to encourage and incentivize reading. Others, unfortunately, use it to require and monitor accelerated reading, defending it because of the numbers of books read. But they cannot defend the duress associated with those books in many minds.

As my wife observes, mandatory AR that bears one’s grade is an ego boost for the avid reader. For the less-than-enthused reader, however, it makes him or her less enthused. Reading becomes drudgery, like the piano lessons from which I used to go run and hide. But, of course, you can’t hide.

Similar to much of what’s happened in public education, the focus is on quantity, not quality, and on gizmos and widgets marketed by people who know their target audiences. (Hint: it’s not children.) As with all learning tools, the problem is not AR itself. Just as we who voice concerns about overemphasis on testing say the problem isn’t tests. It’s how they’re applied.

For a child who has low verbal skills or is a plodding reader (my hand is raised for the latter trait), one book is the equivalent of 20 when you compare that child to those who, like my eldest son, zipped through “Anna Karenina” in middle school. Another problem: AR-rated books, at least as I recall seven or eight years since, inordinately were tilted toward fiction and away from biography, sports, music or varied topics that would get a child to read. The goal should be love — reading for pleasure. “The Willie Mays Story” was my gateway to literacy. So were baseball cards and the sports page.

If we had AR in my time, who knows? A book might not be considered the sweet refreshment it is today after a long day in the information-age vineyards.