Some great ideas to help our children seem so obvious that you wonder why no-one thought of them earlier! This video describes one such idea - one minute long; please take a look.
It seems that 30 minutes a week of subtitled film songs doubles the chance that young children end up 'reading well' and it seems there is a mountain of evidence of other benefits too. A magic button to help kids read - who would have thought it? But there is something else much more important than just learning to read; becoming a reader which is less about decoding symbols to extract their meaning, and more about seeing the world in a wholly unnatural way.
This cartoon makes the point; that the simple act of immersing oneself in a book is what author Adam Garfinkle calls Deep Literacy. He argues that reading a book is not such a simple or inconsequential act at all, but in fact a wondrous thing 'nurturing our capacity for abstract thought, enabling us to pose and answer difficult questions, empowering our creativity and imagination, and refining our capacity for empathy'.
When we are immersed in deep reading, we are in effect living richer lives than we would likely have in everyday experience - in worlds that exist only in our heads. No other animal has this creative and imaginative power - and the value for our moral outlooks is hard to overestimate. It doesn't have to be Anne Franks' diary; anything which evokes an emotion is educative and allows us to experience something at some level before it happens to us; to live, therefore, 'more widely' than we might otherwise do - and hence more wisely. I learnt something from the wonderful A Man called Ove during this break - hard to put into words, but I think I'll see old age and grief and loss slightly differently now; slightly more kindly.
The effect of reading is, however broader than just the emotional sensitivities. It has a broader cognitive intellectual effect. Garfinkle argues that people who cannot or will not deep read 'typically suffer from an attenuated capability to comprehend and use abstract reasoning', and quotes Henry Kissinger's assessment:
Reading books requires you to form concepts, to train your mind to relationships....A book is a large intellectual construction; you can't hold it all in mind easily or at once. You have to struggle mentally to internalize it. ... People [who] are not readers but researchers, they float on the surface.... [the inability to deep read] makes strategic thinking about world order nearly impossible to achieve.
Neil Postman put it succinctly, if more broadly, in his wonderful 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Only in the printed word can complicated truths be rationally conveyed. That's not a popular thing to say these days, when many educators like to talk about a multiplicity of representations - but just as some maths is best done using algebra, some theatre is best conveyed in performance, and some poetry is best spoken, some extended arguments (that is, structures of thought) are best in written form. Books allow us to engage in extended, nuanced, referenced arguments in ways that other media do not, because the printed word simply lives differently to the spoken word.
What does this mean for schools and families? I hope it might explain why it's a fine thing to take our kids to libraries, allow them to buy books, create the time and encouragement for them to read, talk about their reading with them - and for them to see us reading. For our part, we're ensuring our classrooms are full of books, our physical libraries are enhanced and not displaced by digital resources, that we preserve space for reading in the curriculum, that we share our favourites with our students - all part of modelling the reading culture we want them to join.
References
Garfinkle, A (2021) The Erosion of Deep Literacy National Affairs 47
Postman, N (1985) Amusing Ourselves to Death. Penguin.
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