Zero To Travel Podcast · Tuesday, September 15, 2026
Ann Morgan argues that the conventional approach to reading, which emphasizes understanding and bringing prior knowledge, can be limiting. She suggests that for mainstream English speakers, much of culture is already tailored to align with their worldview, making it challenging to step outside of this centered perspective.
“The way that I had learned to read, everything I looked, I expected about how you should read wasn't going to work when I was really reading internationally because I'd been taught to read or I, I'd grown up expecting that you should read by bringing knowledge to the things that you read and trying to understand.”
“Which sounds obvious. It's like, of course you'd read to understand. Why else would you? And yes, in some senses, yes, we do read to understand. We want to understand and and that's the joy of it. But the problem is that if you think that reading is only about trying to understand everything, you can miss out on a lot.”
“For those of us who are sort of mainstream English speakers, we may not realize it, but a lot of culture traditionally has been tailored for us. So it's catered to us. So very carefully what we need to understand has been explained to us. The assumptions that work in it have been aligned with our broadly with our world views.”