The best habit a child can develop is that of reading.
And though we live in a world that offers myriad distractions and diversions, we as a nation cannot afford to lose sight of a fundamental educational value: reading.
It is no great revelation that the printed word is the most remarkable creation of man.
More books are being published today than ever before, despite the popularity of TV and the Internet.
The world of books has never been so vast and so available—either in bookstores or online.
Hard-bound copies of the most expensive kind, when first published, can now be purchased on the Web for literally pennies on the dollar of the dust-jacket price.
Ideas printed in books will last if there are people on this planet. And yet, each year an estimated 1 million teenagers drop out of high school (a third of U.S. dropouts never reach the 10th grade).
Despite being the wealthiest nation on earth, America maintains a public education system in which nearly 30 percent of high school students don’t graduate.
One out of every four reads below basic grade levels, and compared to students from more affluent backgrounds, few of their low-income counterparts are adequately prepared for college.
Part of the reason for so many failures is that students are tired of struggling with words they simply cannot comprehend.
And yet, even some of the brightest students of our generation would rather take a beating than read a novel by one of the world’s classic authors.
Reading assignments are viewed by teenagers as a kind of punishment doled out by teachers who merely want to annoy their students.
It’s amazing just how many kids graduating from high school boast of never having read a single book during their four-year term.
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Therefore, the failure of the national educational system to help students improve their reading skills on the secondary level is a crime.
A teacher’s main purpose in the classroom is to instill in his students a hunger for learning. He must inspire his pupils in ways that go far beyond the literary terms or math equations on the blackboard—in ways that students themselves likely won’t realize until well after their school days are over. As the poet William Butler Yeats once said, “Education is not filling a pail but lighting a fire.”
Meanwhile, several national literacy studies reveal that an estimated 47 percent of the American adult population performs only the simplest reading skills.
Astonishing as it may seem, it’s true. One in four children in America grows up without learning how to read.
And what’s more, fewer than 40 million Americans can complete any challenging literacy tasks that require above average reading skills—meaning they can add the total on a bank slip or identify a piece of specific information in a brief newspaper or magazine article.
An estimated 25 million Americans, meanwhile, cannot read or write at all.
The U.S. Department of Education claims that an additional 45 million persons are considered “functionally illiterate”—those without the reading or writing skills to find work. Sadly, most Americans do not know they do not have the skills to earn a living in our increasingly technological society, according to a statement released a decade ago by the U.S. Secretary of Education.
In our post-industrial, most Americans make a living with their heads instead of their hands. Education—not steel, coal, or even capital—is the key to our economic future.
It is estimated that each year that nearly one million high school seniors graduate unable to read their diploma.
Meanwhile, our national public libraries are jam-packed with scintillating reading material, yet many of our most cultured youth who can read choose not to.
And as Mark Twain once said, “The person who can read and doesn’t is no better off than the person who cannot read at all.”
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Top o’ the morning!