It seems as if no one reads anymore, unless of course the content can be shared in 140 characters or less. Even reading a blog I find myself rushing towards the end and skipping lines of a whopping three paragraph submission at times. I glance at Facebook updates, skim e-mails, ignore texts, and don’t even see the words in advertisements anymore. Words have become secondary to meaning. I can tell more about someone by how they type then what they type sometimes, most of the times actually.
Sometimes I think there are more people writing then reading. All the blogs that get posted and never seen by anyone but the author, all the journals that reveal peoples deepest thoughts, shopping lists, notes to self and memos that go unnoticed. There is a plethora of written word out there with an ever dwindling audience to receive it. Less than half a century ago it was unheard of for the majority of the peasants to be literate, now we’ve created a civilization where, literacy be damned, we’ll be ignorant if we want by ignoring having to read anything of importance.
Reading is not exciting, it’s not sexy, it takes imagination, there is a lot of time that needs to be put in to it to get a payoff, it is a solitary endeavor, it stimulates different regions of your brain, and has been denigrated by the subtle but subversive manipulation of other types of media to compete and conquer in their field. Why imagine scenarios based on written words when you can live it in a simulation based on written code you never have to see?
Reading is by design deployed at children as a hassle. By giving them giant text books and assigning reading as homework this creates the idea early in life that reading is work. It is a choir not a pleasure to most children. Of course there are the rare gems that fall in love with reading and end up not only finishing their assigned summer reading but going beyond and finishing all of the recommended reading as well. I can’t say that was me, and if it was you this essay isn’t aimed at you. For the rest of us school ingrained a sense that reading, not to mention, math, science, social studies , and the gauntlet of courses offered are redundant, boring, and for work, not fun.
Why did Beethoven create symphonies or Shakespeare his plays? What was it that gave Galileo or Einstein the insight to discover? Who else but Columbus could have reached the New World at his time? Could anyone but Armstong have walked on the moon first? What is it that drove Jefferson to write the Declaration of Independence or King to declare to the world his vision of a better future? Were they driven by a sense that what they were doing was work, were they conditioned to believe that writing, science, math and such are boring and only useful in the hours while forced to be inside an institute of learning?
Great people do great things precisely because they take what they have learned and apply it to their everyday life. They go beyond what is required of them and they set sights for themselves which are higher than what others hold them to. Instead of endowing our children with a sense of their education being a burden and a hassle we should be actively engaging with kids on multiple levels, as parents, teachers, community members, family, and friends to develop their skills and a sense of self that goes beyond basic knowledge and reiteration of redundant facts.