I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with some young college age people recently.
Admittedly these people are focused on science, mathematics and engineering.
All are products of our local school districts.
None of them have ever read a book. I’m not quibbling about the differences between e-books and paper ones. No books.
They all use electronic means to look up specific facts.
One even told me he “sees no value in history”.
What has happened to the curriculum at our schools? Are we spending so much time on tests that we are leaving people behind? And where were their parents on this?
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
Readingis hard….”Google it” is easy 🙂
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There is so much wrong with our public education, and this lack of reading is only one of the many things missing from a well rounded education. Remember when we had to memorize things? I still believe that the simple process of learning how to memorize helps to train the brain. And, we had required reading in some classes? How about oral presentations of our work in class?
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Please don’t get me started on this subject!
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Decline of Western Civilization. You heard it here.
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Schools teach and school districts emphasize what the politicians in Austin tell them to do. School districts do not make up the state standards. Schools do not make up the state mandated tests. That all comes out of Austin and to some extent Washington. It all got f*cked up when George Bush’s NCLB was enacted. Remember, he was elected in part based on the “Texas Education Miracle.”
Want to change the way kids learn? Change Austin and the politicians in we send there.
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On a related note – the Times today tells us that “Tesla says it want to higher veterans.”
Not reading also means not understanding when something makes no sense.
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Helen,
What does one expect from a newspaper in which the lead story in its online edition is the appearance of the San Diego Chicken at the Chihuahuas game?
Ramon Renteria might have thought he got the last laugh today when he castigated the reader who called the Times staff “semi-functional illiterates,” but the reader got it right.
The Times certainly isn’t going to inspire anyone to read. It’s a sad day when this is what passes for the one and only daily newspaper in the nation’s 19th largest city.
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It is not all bad. Really.
“Clinging to print these days may be a bit like taking the horse and buggy to work. But doesn’t reading make us more human? Isn’t it a universal sign of civilization? Not really, says Marc Prensky, the media and technology writer who originated the term “digital native.” “There are some things that are common to every human society,” he says. “Speaking is one of them. Reading and writing are not on that list.” In the classical world, we forced ourselves to do something neither natural nor inevitable, he explains, but that solved a problem: After a while, there was so much information that it needed to be written down so it wouldn’t be lost. But that, Prensky says, doesn’t make print somehow exalted.
In fact, Socrates never wrote anything down and Plato’s warnings about writing are often used by digital utopians as a lash to beat skeptics. In the West, silent, individual reading was not widespread until the 17th century. And of course, Shakespeare only wrote his plays down because he needed a way to record their language for his actors: The central work of the most enduring writer in English was never meant to be read silently on the page. Prensky has described books as “primitive tools,” and he looks forward to the day when a university bans paper books from campus.
“Reading was the best we had for centuries,” Prensky says. “That was it. Before the middle of the 20th century, the way most educated people learned about the world was through reading; reading became for our generation this sacred thing. But today’s kids learn about the world in a lot of different ways — movies, game-playing, television. Reading and writing don’t disappear, but the ecology changes.”
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/4/18/is-reading-too-muchbadforkids.html
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