Do Books Still Matter?
When parents call to sign up their teenagers for one of her preparatory courses for college-entry exams, local testing guru Martha Geller has one question for them: Is your child a reader?
It’s a crucial question, says Geller, owner of Education for Testing in Blue Ash, because reading is the key to improving vocabulary, writing skills, spelling and mastering complex material - not to mention pulling down higher scores on the college boards.
Dr. Dan Nelson, medical director for the child psychiatry unit at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, takes the benefits of reading one step further. By requiring a highly organized way of thinking about the world, reading actually helps build a better brain, he says. “There’s a lot of brain research to show that people who read more, think more and have better brain development,” he says.
But rather than embracing an activity that seems like a no-brainer, Americans appear to be drifting away from reading in record numbers.
According to a National Endowment for the Arts study released Nov. 19, fewer than half of American adults read a single book in a given year. The average 15-year-old spends just seven minutes a day on voluntary reading, and much of that is while playing video games or watching TV. And as daily reading time has dropped over the last two decades, so has reading proficiency, even among college-educated adults…
Traditionalists say people are reading less. Free thinkers say they’re reading differently.
Book lovers say there’s no substitute for classical literature, bedtime stories and the quiet, reflective process of reading privately. Futurists say only smugness and sentimentality make written text the superior of video images, symbols and online communication.
Some educators say the United States is losing a rich tradition of individual reading. Some historical researchers say such a notion was a myth from the start.
“Text has kind of hijacked what we think learning and thinking are all about,” said Andrea Saveri, research director at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif. “Text-based literacy is only a blip on the horizon, historically. Look at cave paintings, song lines telling stories about physical places, and other oral traditions. Those are literacy, too.”
But NEA Chairman Dana Gioia says traditional print media require “sustained, linear attention” that digital communication does not. In his introduction to the study, Gioia writes, “The cold statistics confirm something that most readers know but have mostly been reluctant to declare as fact - books change lives for the better.” …
Linda Gambrell, an education professor at Clemson University and president of the International Reading Association, says the issue is not where or how often Americans are reading, but what skills they’re using. “What most of us are doing online is scanning-searching,” she says. “It’s superficial reading. We need a balance. We need to not just foster short-term reading but sustained reading as well. It’s through that sort of reading that we’re exposed to the richness of language in our environment.”
“We’re just not going to be reading for text anymore,” said Saveri, the Institute for the Future researcher. “We’re going to be ‘reading’ for movies, graphics, images, digital stories, symbols,” she says. “You may say young people aren’t reading the classics, but 20 years from now, there might be some classic multimedia pieces with video, with hyperlinks. That’s the new edge of literacy.”
Saveri suggests parents blog with their kids, make a YouTube video, jump into the new media - and take books along. “We’ve got to get over our nostalgia,” she says. “Denying your child a rich media world is doing your child a disservice.”
Source: Cincinnati Enquirer, OH
http://tinyurl.com/2lxuwx
December 18th, 2007 at 3:52 AM
Brain plasticity has been proven to change even at advanced ages, but reading certainly plays an important role in youngsters because there is a stage in youth when the human brain undergoes a synaptic pruning - which is the brains way of removing unneeded connections or clutter. The extent of that pruning does depend on how the brain is enriched through early learning.
Since I am 46 years old now, I am more interested in brain plasticity issues and while I cannot reclaim back the years when I did not take reading seriously (hardly touching anything of substance), I can set in motion a process of self-teaching myself reading qualities. In that regard when I first encountered the internet in 1998 at the age of 37, that effectively became the first time in my life that I was formally reading as an experience rather than as an occupation to achieve some other ulterior result.
I was always great at doing exams, I could recall facts and information by skimming through pages and it wasn’t that difficult for me to “collect” a plethora of certificates, diploma’s and postgraduate qualifications. Yet in all that book work, I wasn’t reading, I wasn’t adding to the experience of developing as a human being.
Writing has never been an issue for me, but reading is something that I greatly disliked doing, and I think for me, the idea of passing examinations was much more important to me than the joy of reading - reading in that regard was viewed by me as the chore that I had to get through in order to pick up the facts that I needed to be academically successful.
Today I recognize that depth does make a substantial difference to the quality of ones own life, for there is an intelligence within words, meanings and nuances that can be completely missed, a higher level of comprehension, that does come into view when we begin to learn to read.
I have experienced this difference but the key for me today is that it is never too late to start, it is never too late to make books a key part of your life. I have not fully engaged reading even now, but the last decade has been a journey of great recovery, of making up the time lost in the earlier decades, and I am keeping this journey going, because I realize what a difference this makes, and even though I keep this journey mostly private from the outside world, it is one I do share with all my kids - and that in itself has led to the creation of a smarter and finer relationship.
This however would not have happened if the internet had not sprung up one day back in March of 1998 - and so I am indebted to these experience and I really do understand what it now means when I see those two words that I now consider the key to a 21st Century life - CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT - and I today I refer to that as a journey.
M.
December 27th, 2007 at 12:06 AM
If you take it as statiscial thing
of course it would be better
to use screens to get information
but wre’re not bots.
Reading is not only earning informations.
Having more things in head
does not makes you feel smarter.
the way you seek and get information
is as important as what you earn.
It’s always sunny outside
[excuse approximative english]