Growing up, my teacher didn’t have to push reading unto us. I remember getting scolded by my sixth grade English teacher for trying to finish my book while she was attempting to instruct her class. My teachers growing up had to struggle to get our noses out of books! So, the idea that books are becoming less and less needed/wanted in the lives of our youth(this feeling weird being said considering I’m still youthful myself) almost breaks my heart. A world where our children don’t understand good and proper literature is a world where text such as Huck-Finn and Catcher In The Rye get buried in an old attic, never to be found again. Tales of the Spider Wick Chronicles won’t dance around the imaginations of 11 and 12 year-olds. A literature-less world is a world where history is bound to repeat itself, and the fresh minds are to be ravaged with garbage and little to no free will. The concept of a book free world brings to images of a land where free thinking is at a low, and America believes everything their government and general media tells them, without doing any further investigation, or paint an opinion of their own.
I feel like in the future it won’t be bookless so to speak. physically yes it will be bookless but that is because everything has become so digitalized. So in the future it will be completely paperless. There will always be ways to read and collect information it will just be a matter of how that is done. maybe it will be like the Matrix and we just uplink and upload the information to our minds. haha you just never know how things will turn out. but I do believe there will always be people who want to read and continue learning.
Readership among our youth has been on the decline for some time now. There are many factors at work in this decline that should be examined to better facilitate our readers in the future,
Children are being taught more and more from videos and computer programs, and less from actual books. There are some who say that handwriting itself could become obsolete in the near future, with keypad skills prized in its stead.
In today’s fast paced world, many adults feel they do not have the time to read for pleasure. They are more likely to watch a movie or play a game, than to read a book. This trait is being passed down to our children, who, more and more, are seeing reading as a chore. Something must be done to encourage young readers, or we will lose a big part of our culture and our capacity to imagine. Books bring imagination to life. But without good reading skills, books and reading assignments are pretty much a chore.
I would like to see more emphasis being placed on reading and writing in schools, and limits to the time spent watching videos
Books are heavy and bulky compared with a sleek iPad. I think efforts should be made to have more age appropriate digital media available to young readers. Interactive incentive programs to entice children to read and share their understanding, I think are critical.
Harry Potter proves that kids want to read. We just need to make sure there are lots of interesting things for them to choose from.