Summary
Reading shapes who we are and helps us understand the world. School often makes reading feel like a chore, taking away our natural love for it. To bring back joy in reading, we should choose books freely and read for ourselves, not just to learn.
Highlights
id976898678
You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
Ray Bradbury
id976945002
For all the good it’s done, much of our progress dominated by technology came at the expense of culture. 25 years after Bradbury’s statement, the destructive forces he described have succeeded beyond his scariest dreams. Not that it wasn’t obvious to anyone with internet access, but we do read less than ever. Youngsters only take 4–10 minutes a day — on weekends — which probably includes Twitter. 24% of adults haven’t even read part of a book in the last year. The median number of books for those who do read is four.
id976945907
Psychologists have a name for this black-and-white system of false and correct answers too: convergent thinking. What’s fuzzy about it is not so much the system itself, but the belief with which we still hold on to it.
Pensamiento convergente, o la tendencia a pensar que hay sólo dos categorías de respuesta: correcta e incorrecta.
id976957384
Sir Ken Robinson calls it the industrial model of education:
“I believe we have a system of education that is modeled on the interests of industrialism and in the image of it. I’ll give you a couple of examples. Schools are still pretty much organized on factory lines: ringing bells, separate facilities, specialized into separate subjects.
We still educate children by batches. We put them through the system by age group. Why do we do that? Why is there this assumption that the most important thing kids have in common is how old they are? It’s like the most important thing about them is their date of manufacture.
Well, I know kids who are much better than other kids at the same age in different disciplines. Or at different times of the day. Or better in smaller groups than in large groups. Or sometimes, they want to be on their own. If you’re interested in the model of learning, you don’t start from this production line mentality.”