Today was a fasting day next one will be in two days as I'm changing my rhythm to Mondays and Thursdays.
Yesterday Fianna told me she was so happy because Eliot was reading his third book in a row with minimal prompting. Reading is one of those things that is deemed to be a good thing in itself. I myself was an avid reader most of my life (I still read a lot but less than I used to) and therefore felt I should encourage my children to read. But the alternatives to reading nowadays are numerous and varied. Films and series are now on demand rather than at fixed times like they used to be, Video games are team events, Facebook and Instagram allow extensive interaction on all sorts of subjects from silly cats to fake political news, Twitter provides constant running commentary on events, Podcasts bring us back to the oral tradition, YouTube and TED talks give us a conference like experience and the internet is an amazing encyclopedia of the best and the worst of humanity.
So why should we expect our children and ourselves to read books? Does reading a book really prepare you for the world of tomorrow, am I just being out of touch when I think that book reading is an important part of our education? After all digital media is much faster than books, you could argue that you can get a lot more variety and experience through sound and image than through a printed word. The saying is that a picture is worth a 1,000 words , if that is true wouldn't it be more useful (and much faster) to study a 1,000 pictures rather than read a million words (which is around 10 books)? I don't have the answer and I am heavily biased towards books, due to being an old dog who probably finds it difficult to learn new tricks, but I would be interested in reading (or watching) an objective study on the subject.
Yesterday Fianna told me she was so happy because Eliot was reading his third book in a row with minimal prompting. Reading is one of those things that is deemed to be a good thing in itself. I myself was an avid reader most of my life (I still read a lot but less than I used to) and therefore felt I should encourage my children to read. But the alternatives to reading nowadays are numerous and varied. Films and series are now on demand rather than at fixed times like they used to be, Video games are team events, Facebook and Instagram allow extensive interaction on all sorts of subjects from silly cats to fake political news, Twitter provides constant running commentary on events, Podcasts bring us back to the oral tradition, YouTube and TED talks give us a conference like experience and the internet is an amazing encyclopedia of the best and the worst of humanity.
So why should we expect our children and ourselves to read books? Does reading a book really prepare you for the world of tomorrow, am I just being out of touch when I think that book reading is an important part of our education? After all digital media is much faster than books, you could argue that you can get a lot more variety and experience through sound and image than through a printed word. The saying is that a picture is worth a 1,000 words , if that is true wouldn't it be more useful (and much faster) to study a 1,000 pictures rather than read a million words (which is around 10 books)? I don't have the answer and I am heavily biased towards books, due to being an old dog who probably finds it difficult to learn new tricks, but I would be interested in reading (or watching) an objective study on the subject.
That didn’t go the direction I thought it would. What’s really great about book reading though is that you have to imagine everything so you develop your imagination and creativity.
ReplyDeleteIt's good to be unpredictable sometimes
DeleteJulian.... as we can see with Fabien :)
ReplyDeleteYou didn’t mention the option of listening to stories which links us back to the days where information/stories/wisdom was only an airborn “technology” or tradition. I guess it connected people as well as it encouraged memorizing and imagination. It might well have been media meets books all-in-one.
Good point. I'll add podcasts to my post.
Delete