Essential Questions assessment from wiki

When i think about reading and literacy i think of it as a big picture. To someone outside of the education field one might think of reading and literacy as just that. But after being in the educational field for four years i still find myself asking what else can we do to better a learners reading and literacy skills?
Do i think literacy and reading starts before a child enters school...absolutly! A great way to think of it is to look back on the article of The Greatest Art for Little Readers. Reading this article brought me back to my childhood. Growing up i was not much of a reader, in fact i hated it. I was always the last one to finish a test and would cringe if the teacher would ask me to read out load. As i read this this article though i related to what they were saying as a student and a teacher. So many of those books mentioned i can remember as a child and not because i read them from front to back, but because they grabbed my attention and lurred me into reading. As i sit and watch my students now i can see that happening to them. I watch them pick up these books and turn the pages one at a time intriqued at the pictures and trying to tell their own story of what is going on. As the year goes on these preschoolers actually can tell some stories from start to finish because of the picture representation provided on the paper. A great example i have of this is back in January i was doing a lession on hybernation and i took out Eric Carle's Brown Bear. When i held up the book one of my students said, "can i read it?" So i let him take a whirl and sure enough he read the entire story.
Then i came across the wikipedia acticle and i thought to myself, no wonder why there is no set answer to the question of what is literacy and reading. There are so many things to take into concideration to give that question a solid answer. When i read the beginning of the article it frustrated me to think that people actually believed this. But after reading what the recent researchers had to say i did feel a little more at ease. Personally i don't think that there is one world wide defintion of literacy and reading. I feel this way because i think there are too many diverse factors to take into concideration. Factors such as culture, religion, and most importantly schooling. I know the researchers touched on that and after teaching in two different abbott school districts, i can relate to the stereotypes that these urban city students go through.
What i am wondering most about is the last article. I wonder because i have been faced with a similar situation. When i first started teaching i was using the curriculum SFA and did i like it as a first year teacher who was going through the alternate route....of course! As the years went on, i got very bored and so did the children. One of my personal characteristics is creativity and wanted to be able to use it in my career as a teacher, but once i started teaching i was no longer aloud to use my skills. This past school year i have started in another district where i use a different curriculum that allows me to be creative and allows me to cater to the needs of my students. What i am wondering about most here is why are some of these curriculums set up so structured? It creates an impersonal setting making the student feel as though he/she is a number instead of a student who is there to learn, a student who is there to be educated.