Rafael Hohmann's Blog - Posts Tagged "education"
A quick case for why we should encourage more reading in the younger generation
So just a quick opinion blog:
As our technology grows, media and entertainment is more readily available on the fly, in your pocket, on demand. This causes us to enter a mindset of instant gratification and quick results. We have "less time" for dedicating ourselves to media-in this case books. In actuality, we have the same amount of time, we're just using that time to consume more, and in more of a diversity. So instead of siting down in a chair and reading for a few hours, we go and watch 10 Youtube videos, browse Facebook for a bit, like some tweets, hit Youtube again, then check your phone messages, watch a quick episode on Netflix, on and on...there's more opportunity to do more, and because of it, confining ourselves to one thing, dedicating ourselves to it, and having the patience to go from beginning to end of a lengthy book-well we just don't have the time.
Yet if we can more readily push the greater reward that comes from reading a book, the greater satisfaction that one can feel from being engrossed in the life of these fictional characters, push that into the younger generations instead of giving them their first phone at the age of five, then we can perhaps stop seeing teenagers and college students take ten minutes to read on paragraph out lout, mispronounce half the words, and not stop during punctuation.
Unfortunately, as a side-effect of technology (don't get me wrong, I'm a big tech-lover) many of our younger kids-more and more of them-are finding reading slow and boring. Yet now more than ever we are seeing young children with little to no imagination for themselves. How many reboots do you see come from Hollywood? How many times does a new show or book come out that turns out to be extremely predictable because they've fallen into the depths of creative formula? No wonder less and less people can think for themselves out there. No wonder common sense is disappearing. No wonder literacy rates drop at the same rate the national average I.Q. does.
I propose a stronger push towards reading. In schools, promote it through movies and other electronic media, and make it a stronger focus.
Just my two cents.
As our technology grows, media and entertainment is more readily available on the fly, in your pocket, on demand. This causes us to enter a mindset of instant gratification and quick results. We have "less time" for dedicating ourselves to media-in this case books. In actuality, we have the same amount of time, we're just using that time to consume more, and in more of a diversity. So instead of siting down in a chair and reading for a few hours, we go and watch 10 Youtube videos, browse Facebook for a bit, like some tweets, hit Youtube again, then check your phone messages, watch a quick episode on Netflix, on and on...there's more opportunity to do more, and because of it, confining ourselves to one thing, dedicating ourselves to it, and having the patience to go from beginning to end of a lengthy book-well we just don't have the time.
Yet if we can more readily push the greater reward that comes from reading a book, the greater satisfaction that one can feel from being engrossed in the life of these fictional characters, push that into the younger generations instead of giving them their first phone at the age of five, then we can perhaps stop seeing teenagers and college students take ten minutes to read on paragraph out lout, mispronounce half the words, and not stop during punctuation.
Unfortunately, as a side-effect of technology (don't get me wrong, I'm a big tech-lover) many of our younger kids-more and more of them-are finding reading slow and boring. Yet now more than ever we are seeing young children with little to no imagination for themselves. How many reboots do you see come from Hollywood? How many times does a new show or book come out that turns out to be extremely predictable because they've fallen into the depths of creative formula? No wonder less and less people can think for themselves out there. No wonder common sense is disappearing. No wonder literacy rates drop at the same rate the national average I.Q. does.
I propose a stronger push towards reading. In schools, promote it through movies and other electronic media, and make it a stronger focus.
Just my two cents.
