From my long experience with education I have noticed that our children love to read and love to hear stories, however the parents and schools are busy teaching stuff that one will not use in real life, and the habit dies off slowly.  We need to set an hour at least aside to read to children and ask them to read too.  Reading is of utmost importance and entry to universities in the future depends on the reading score of the students.  Many students are getting lower marks in reading and writing then listening or speaking, so its certainly important to focus on this.

Many ideas can be put in practice, like reading groups, children book clubs and garage schools (the latter won an award at WISE conference), in Bahrain we can do more as we are the only country that has zero illiteracy. let us work on this and save the alphabets, let us try to teach the kids their old habits of story telling even if the story is fictional, we need more kids who can read and write.