Remember when you hated English class

 

Remember the phrase: “the world is my oyster”

Remember when young people around the world were obsessed with the Henry Potter book series, remember when a couple of generations ago, the obsession for adventure was the Hardy Boys series

Remember reading the Sunday paper thoroughly

Remember the struggle of having to read history books in high school. Remember the phrase “if you don’t read history you are doomed to repeat it”

Remember reading all the lyrics to your favorite song and memorizing them, yet when the English teacher gave you poetry you balked or worse made you read Shakespeare

Remember speech or drama class, well maybe not all of you

Remember that time you had to go to the library to finish your research paper for high school or college

Remember the time you wanted to go to the library because it was raining outside and there was nothing better to do and it was close

Remember reading about yesterday’s games in the sports page because only one or two games were on television or remember when you devoured statistics on the sports page and craved more

Remember reading, the joy, the struggle, the information you craved, the information you were forced to know, do you remember what it gave you?

My fear is we are now probably in our second generation where reading and literature are dying especially in public education. Once we could read as humans it captivated us for millennia, yet now we face losing humanity because we don’t take the time to understand who we are. And how did we do that, by reading.

And people who hate reading still benefited from it. They don’t want to admit it because then they have to say English class was worth it, lol. Yes, we all struggled diagraming sentences or knowing the difference between an adverb and an adjective. And some of the deeper particulars were maybe just for people who write, yet all in all if we do not understand our own language whether English, Spanish, Japanese or whatever, we never can grow in our lives.

So again my fear is our current young generations are cheated in life. Whether it is knowledge, adventure, entertainment, relaxing with a good book, exploring the deeper meaning of life through a few words (poetry), or whatever, young people today live blindly. And as our current President likes to say, “sad”.

I am going to take two quick digs. First a political one, the democrats always say they want better education, then why is our education system systematically getting worse decade after decade?

Second a religious one, or the anti religious one. Children in high school did or maybe they still do, read more about mythology than Christianity. Yet Christianity influenced more on Western history than anything else over the last two thousand years. So if you hate Christianity I am surprised you don’t want it in school discussing the parts where men used Christianity for their own benefit in history class versus the true reason for Christianity (which you don’t want read). Or if Christian, aren’t you worried young people will not be able to read the Bible soon? Unless of course you want to control people through religion and not let them learn their faith?

Reading is education on so many levels. You can control the narrative if you control what is read. So contrarily you need to make sure people can and do read quite a bit. Or at least read enough to develop critical thinking skills. Yet today, education is brushed over and reading is now like too many books ending up in the trash bin.

If you care about the future, our children, your own lives, the state of the world or just enjoying a raining Saturday afternoon, you need to get involved in bringing back reading, especially in education. This isn’t a well that would be a good idea. This is actually drastically important for the future of humanity. Humans may live for millennia more, yet humanity may die soon if we do not recognize the dangers facing us. And more than a few dangers face us now from morality dying to AI to quality of life and more. We are watching us destroy our own children without a peep.

Remember the phrase the world is our oyster, where we have everything to gain referencing the beauty of the pearl inside, well right now we give our children an empty oyster. We, who do read, need to remember why we read and share that joy with the future.

 

(And yes I see the irony of people who need to read, not reading this post.)