If you are in publishing or media and haven’t read
Print is Dead, a blog by Jeff Gomez,
I highly urge you to subscribe.
“The real battle is now being fought — and
potentially lost — and it has nothing to do with pages or screens, bindings or
devices. It has instead to do with eyes
and words.”
This post
about the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) literacy study really
struck a chord with me. I read more than
ever now, but I just threw out 5 years of back issues of the Harvard Business
Review, Fast Company, and several newsletters. I read online or stored PDF files. I do read books, but not as many as I used to read. I wonder what reading studies “count” as
reading?
In another post: What
your bookshelf says about you, Jeff writes:
“In fact,
not only is print dead, but it also seems — since its true purpose is now to be
admired in display rather than read or absorbed — to have been stuffed and
mounted.”
You may agree with him. You may not. But I promise he’ll make you think!
The problem with reading is that most people view it as a chore. They don’t enjoy it. This starts in high school when kids are forced to read the classics – Shakespeare and Dickens – before they are ready for them.
That’s like teaching geometry before teaching addition and subtraction. Ridiculous.
Here’s a better way:
http://darkpartyreview.blogspot.com/2007/11/essay-fixing-our-reading-problem.html
The problem with reading is that most people view it as a chore. They don’t enjoy it. This starts in high school when kids are forced to read the classics – Shakespeare and Dickens – before they are ready for them.
That’s like teaching geometry before teaching addition and subtraction. Ridiculous.
Here’s a better way:
http://darkpartyreview.blogspot.com/2007/11/essay-fixing-our-reading-problem.html
Mary – I love to read too, but I love learning even more (and reading is one way I do that – there are also others).
Reading is critical. But, it seems to me that not reading is a symptom of the kind of apathy you describe (not even caring about what’s going on in the world around you or what has come before).
Thanks for bringing up some great points.
Ann
I strongly believe that it’s not the gap between rich and poor, or the technology have and have nots that’s ultimately going to kill our our society. It’s the gap between people who read and those who don’t. If you don’t read, you don’t learn how to think – outside your life, your home, your city, your box.
Sure, I’m prejudiced since I love to read – but invariably when talking to someone who appears to have only the most shallow grasp of local or world affairs…or that knows nothing about world history…or looks blank when even the basics of business, marketing, or selling come up…It comes down to the last book they read was when they were forced to back in school.