Got Reading Skills?
Maybe someday your kids won't. Or not in the same way that we read at any rate.
Meditations in an Emergency
Random thoughts, memories, convoluted therapeutic ramblings, a billboard of love.
Monday, November 13, 2006
About Me
- Name: Christopher Barzak
- Location: Youngstown, Ohio, United States
Stories
A Mad Tea PartyPlenty
Born on the Edge of an Adjective
Caryatids
The Cure
The Trail of My Father's Blood
Vanishing Point
The Other Angelas
The Language of Moths
The Barbed Wire Boy
Dead Letters
Interviews
TrampolineA View from Outside
Bloggasm Interview
Links
More about meRatbastards
Small Beer Press
Locus
Realms of Fantasy
Strange Horizons
Ideomancer
Pindeldyboz
F&SF
Asimovs
Analog
Previous Posts
- Zadie Smith
- Happy as a Pirate, but with Reservations...
- Life as a Pirate
- While Waiting for Election Results...
- Election Day
- Nothing New to Say
- More Good Times from October
- Pictures from a Busy October
- When Fantasy Moves Into History
- Reading Hannah Arendt's "Between Past and Future"
4 Comments:
That article sounds about right. At some point in the near future, the education system will officially stop aiming for total literacy and comprehension and go for more attainable goals. I like the comparison of reading with appreciation of classical music.
Rick
Hay mismo problema aqui tambien en mi pais.
Parece en todo el mundo?
Conozco los profesores de escuela quien no leen libro,nada.
Ay que educacion!!!
fusakota
I don't think that this is necessarily a bad thing. There are a ton of skills that people gain today that were unheard of when I was a kid--skills like telepresence (the ability to work a set of controls over here that move things on a screen over there). Telepresence means that some day my surgeon can be in New York and I can be in Texas. (Of course it also means that the factory can be in Texas but all the employees be in in Indonesia, where they are paid $12 a day.)
I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing either, though I agree with Meg McCarron, who wrote a rant about this article on her blog about how if reading will no longer be a particularly important skill in the future, I hope that something like film replaces it for teaching people how to analyze and critical thinking skills. I fear critical thinking skills aren't being taught enough as it is, or perhaps that's just here in a working class town where the teachers teach the students to follow instructions rather than originate ideas. Reading, because it has been a primary activity in which we are taught to examine a variety of social and psychological narratives in our lives for so long, is more than just a skill, as the writer of this article failed to see. It's one of the key places in which the modern human mind acquires a sense of the world it's living in and how to be in it. So if reading eventually becomes a basic activity but without literacy to it in the future, Story (yes, I know, the capital S, how snobbish, hehe)the way we explain the world to ourselves and each other, will have to find another vessel. The Oral Tradition we can say passed its heyday long ago. Why shouldn't the tradition of reading find its end stop too? But I do believe something has to replace reading if it eventually functions only as a basic communication tool, but not a tool for teaching a fluency in one's cultural education/assimilation(?).
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