In Touch With Reading

By Betty Miller Buttram
FWIS Contributing Writer

I am of a different generation where it was important to be taught to read, write, and to know arithmetic. These were important elements in educating one to be able to negotiate through life with these basic skills as tools of knowledge. Knowledge must be taught to enable people to move away from ignorance. Times have changed; society has become more advantaged in the way knowledge is received and recorded. A mind must not be wasted or people with be stuck with their own illusions. Reading is a way to stimulate and educate the mind.

Recently, I was in the presence of a 16-year old teenager and when asked the question about whether he reads any books, he stated that he does not read any books and gets most of his reading of what is newsworthy to him from his smartphone which includes information from social media and streaming services.

In doing some research, statistics show that 80% of teenagers do not read for pleasure. Of course, they read school literature assignments because it is part of their educational curriculum. Games on a smartphone, streaming, mindless browsing, television binge watching, notification pings, and social media have caused a decline in reading in teenage lives. These distractions are some of the hampering factors in the lack of reading and a healthy development of the mind. Will reading become a dying knowledge like cursive writing?

Our young folks did not get to this level of not caring about books by themselves. We must go back 60 years and count the loss of at least four generations of our African American young people who have been deprived of who they are because of not reading books about their history.

When the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 and the Voting Rights Bill of 1965 were passed, that generation of young folks in the 1960’s gained long overdue opportunities that had been denied to their parents and doors were now open to them for their future accomplishments. These 1960’s young people are now grandparents, and some are great grandparents. Some of them went through those open doors and left their struggling history behind because they thought they had arrived at equality. However, some did pass that history down to their children.

What does the Civil Rights Movement have to do with this subject of reading? Those who left their history behind had no history to share with their children. If a forty-year-old parent today knows nothing of his or her past because his or her grandparents in the 1960’s did not pass that knowledge down, how can their children know anything? These grandchildren and great-grandchildren must be encouraged today to read about their history, American history, World history, fiction, and non-fiction. There is a wealth of knowledge in books.

There are challenges today in getting a youth to pick up a book to read for pleasure thereby gaining knowledge as well. It can be done. We must find books that will stimulate their interests.