Here’s a possible upside to the writer’s guild strike that will very soon change television as we know it (until the writers get their money, that is): maybe American’s will settle down on the couch after dinner with good book instead of the remote control. According to an American’s are reading less and less and getting dumber and dumber.
“This study shows the startling declines, in how much and how well Americans read, that are adversely affecting this country’s culture, economy and civic life as well as our children’s educational achievement,” said NEA chairman Dana Gioia, an award-winning poet.
The NEA reported that American 15-year-olds ranked 15th in average reading scores for 31 industrialized nations, behind Poland, South Korea, France and Canada among others.
On average, Americans aged 15 to 24 spend nearly two hours a day watching television, and only seven minutes of their free time on reading.
Even among the best educated, the percentage of adults who attended graduate college who were rated proficient in reading prose dropped by 20 percent from 1992 to 2003.
Maybe protesters shouldn’t have been so quick to denounce BET’s Read a Book skit.
Some parents make reading a punishment which makes it forever negative in a child’s mind. My brother only had to read when my mom put him on punishment. Needless to say I’ve never seen him with a novel or anything he didn’t HAVE to read.
My mom did that too. No TV. Whip out the books and she’d read it out loud for HOURS. I would rather get a beating.
I was lucky to have grownup in a house of reading parents, as a child I saw my parents looking at these things for hours on end and decided that I had to learn to do what they did, so I got my brother’s comics and followed my dad around pointing at words and asking “what’s this?”.
As a result I was reading when other kids in K, were learning the alphabets.
The moral is: Monkey see Monkey do.
Oh! and mom would read Shakespeare/Charlotte Bronte aloud to me. (it helped a little)