Reading at young ages is crucial to avoiding damaging effects of technology | Opinion
Extraordinary strides have been made in the technologies that drive our lives, but even as we embrace these wonders, we also know that transformative destructive effects may lurk therein. Currently, our ability to read is vanishing. Is there any preventive action that we as individuals can take? Absolutely.
The latest salvo in this war on the ubiquitous computers in our pockets comes from Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University and the author of the controversial book “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.” He makes an important point, but the matter is even more serious.
Speaking as the parent of four children (the youngest of whom is age 23) and until recently the teacher of hundreds of first-year college students, I would be a fool to deny the painful truths presented so forcefully in Haidt’s latest work, but serious as they may be, they pale beside the destruction of knowledge, learning and education that will overtake our nation if the ability to read long-form texts is lost.
Yet that is the destination that we are moving toward, and it is not hyperbole to say that this danger to the realm of knowledge threatens our understanding even as the world grows exponentially more complex.
Yes, the rewiring of childhood may cause emotional problems for children and adolescents (already a difficult time) but the devastating problem is that in 2024, young people are reaching adulthood unable to read as well as their parents. Should this trend continue, the more technologically advanced cultures will experience a devastating intellectual decline.
Teachers, aware that students of college age do not read with the competence they once did (if they now read books at all), are reacting to these frightening developments with articles in such journals as the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Textbooks today are often digital in nature, and when students “purchase” virtual books the transactions is for a limited time. Gone are the days when college graduates took home a small library in addition to their “sheepskin.”
With the world increasingly aware of the reading problem, we have to ask what are the ramifications? For one thing, the best way to learn to write well is to read. As we read good stuff, magically we internalize it. No matter what we read, it improves our writing. We will also very likely learn something.
In an ideal world, children are born into a home where they see their parents reading books and magazines – both in print and digital – and engaged in family activities, such things as church, travel, or entertainment, to supplement and expand upon the child’s reading. The television and the smartphone should have a minimal role here, even in an infant’s life.
Thanks to our excellent regional library system, it does not take wealth to expose children to books beginning at a very early age and thereby ensuring that they will be reading well before they begin school. It is never too late to build this ability, and summer is a wonderful time for fun reading at any age.
The media may be awash with such articles as “The end of reading,” but loving parents can smile, knowing that they have the power bestow the gift of pleasurable reading on their children and that their kids will very likely graduate from high school, maybe head for college and enter unto a satisfying and rewarding life
For such dreams to come true, “Good Night, Moon” must come in the front door along with the diapers, the teething ring and the baby food. Reading for pleasure ideally starts in the cradle.
Larry Fennelly can be reached at larney_f@hotmail.com.
