I agree. Schools fetishize reading, like reading in itself is something special, but it's not. People do need to know how to read in order to do daily-life stuff, but beyond that, I don't think it's particularly useful to try to force a habit of reading on people if they're not interested.

There are people who treat reading as some talisman of success: if your kid reads (and you can then get finer degrees of this, like "if your kid reads above grade level," or "if your kid reads fifty zillion books instead of just ten," etc., then that means... .they are going to end up being successful corporate lawyers or doctors or portfolio managers or something. And there may be a correlation, but it's not a causal one. Families that force their kids to read for an hour each night probably also do bunches of other things to push their little darlings down a path to material success--but it's not the reading, per se, that did it.

Then there are people who want their kids to read because they themselves like reading. I can sympathize with this, but it's like any other interest. You might want your kids to love football, or fishing, or tinkering with mechanical things, or drawing, or taking care of animals... .and if you share that enthusiasm, they may even go along with it, because they like spending time with you, but whether it catches on as a genuine enthusiasm of their own is another matter, and you can't really force it, I don't think.