One of the long-term goals of literary education in secondary school should be the training of assiduous, capable and independent young readers. But, in reality, in Italian institutions reading education suffers from inadequate attention and ineffective and obsolete routines. This paper aims to highlight contradictions in scholastic rhetoric, both institutional and didactic, that cause the impressive amount of non-readers among young Italians: ministerial directives that lack in regulatory, theoretical, and methodological frameworks (the new Indicazioni Nazionali), but that sometimes exceed in requiring specific contents (the 'untouchable' Promessi sposi, a poetry-oriented canon); the structural conditions of the pedagogical apparatus (Massa 1987) that clash against the kind of fruition required from a novel, giving rise to common practices such as anthological fragmentation and an emphasis on text analysis and test-oriented didactics, rather than focusing on developing real and efficient reading skills. Finally, examples of didactic practices will be given, with the purpose of conciliating the necessary methodological accuracy and the acquisition of reading skills with a revaluation of reading pleasure and the experiential and essential value that it can and should have for every adolescent.