Bibliophobia
People are afraid of books, people worship books blindly, people are attempting to do away with books, the tide of young people who are not comfortable with books is rising. These are some impressions I've received over the last few years.
I think a lot of this stems from one common root. People are unfamiliar with books.
The child who doesn't like to read is one who has had the reading behaviour displaced, most often by some other kind of visual and/or tactile input. If you keep a child bored and put him in a library, he will eventually succumb to bibliophilia because that is his only useful choice.
Instinctively, most parents resist such manipulation when it comes to books, although they are not averse to using other kinds of manipulation with respect to food, sleep and toilet training. It is part of the mystique of the book — some will worship, some will fear, most will set aside as special.
But the book is still the best way to deliver content. It is a compact and persistent data source in which comprehension is delivered not by point-and-click but by the enforcement of a specific kind of cognitive process that is the foundation of the entire education system of the world. It requires symbol recognition and processing at several levels, and metacognition above that.
My prescription is that if you want a child to have a lower chance of being ADHD, subliterate, or just plain barbaric, you should take most of the toys and games away and leave him in a library or bookstore. When you meet, talk about books, model the intelligent reader, and (if you like) teach him to discard trash about Blue Ocean Strategies and suchlike.
I think a lot of this stems from one common root. People are unfamiliar with books.
The child who doesn't like to read is one who has had the reading behaviour displaced, most often by some other kind of visual and/or tactile input. If you keep a child bored and put him in a library, he will eventually succumb to bibliophilia because that is his only useful choice.
Instinctively, most parents resist such manipulation when it comes to books, although they are not averse to using other kinds of manipulation with respect to food, sleep and toilet training. It is part of the mystique of the book — some will worship, some will fear, most will set aside as special.
But the book is still the best way to deliver content. It is a compact and persistent data source in which comprehension is delivered not by point-and-click but by the enforcement of a specific kind of cognitive process that is the foundation of the entire education system of the world. It requires symbol recognition and processing at several levels, and metacognition above that.
My prescription is that if you want a child to have a lower chance of being ADHD, subliterate, or just plain barbaric, you should take most of the toys and games away and leave him in a library or bookstore. When you meet, talk about books, model the intelligent reader, and (if you like) teach him to discard trash about Blue Ocean Strategies and suchlike.
etched with acid at 11:05:00 am
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