Is reading a 'dying habit'?
THE VIEW FROM RIZAL
Since 2011, the Department of Education (DepEd) has been spearheading the country’s celebration of the National Reading Month.
The celebration aims to inspire our youth to adopt and stick to the habit of reading. During this month, schools will be doing activities to get them to love the written word, such as “read-a-thons” and a novel idea called “DEAR” which stands for “Drop Everything and Read.”
We laud any and all efforts by both the government and private sectors to help our children discover the joys and value of reading. We also hope that the celebration of the National Reading Month will help us reflect on a question now being discussed in many parts of the world.
The question is, “Is reading a dying habit?”
And, if yes, what must we do about it?
The fact that many countries celebrate a “reading month” should be an indicator that, yes, reading “is a dying habit,” and which, therefore, needs to be encouraged among the young. The reading habit may have lost out to the strong competition from modern gadgets. It began with television and then came computers, mobile phones, and tablets.
Perhaps, the younger generations have found out that information is much easier to access and obtain from these gadgets which connect them to the world wide web. We recall that during our student days, we had to go through the index cards in our school library to find the books that would provide us with the information we needed for our research and assignments. On an unlucky day, someone else would have checked out the books indicated in the index cards. We will have to wait for the borrower to return the books before we can finally get our hands on the information we badly need.
The other option was to go to the house of classmates whose parents had invested in complete sets of encyclopedias.
Today, information that took us days to obtain can now be accessed within seconds – at the click of a computer mouse or of the “search” button on our cellphones.
Perhaps, we cannot blame our younger generations for turning their back on books.
It also used to be that we turned to books to read stories: fiction, non-fiction, biographies, history. We found it an exhilarating experience to enter into the world of the characters in a story. We imagined ourselves as part of the conflict and its resolution. Oftentimes, we would be so immersed in reading that we would feel we have become the hero of the story.
That kind of reading required much from us. We had to set aside a time and a place to read to enjoy the story. Some stories we would attempt to finish in one day. That would mean foregoing other social activities for the sake of knowing what happened at the end of that story.
Perhaps, today’s younger generations no longer have the time to invest in reading and enjoying books the way we did. They have instead turned to Netflix, Amazon Prime, TCL, and other movie streaming services. They now watch stories rather than read them. They can do it anytime and anywhere with the use of their cellphones.
We do the same. However, we know the difference between “watching” and “reading” a story. There is something special about the reading experience – the smell and the feel of the printed book; the solemnity of the act of turning a page; ending a chapter and moving on to the next. Reading a book did feel like what life is all about.
We hope our children will get to discover these joys one gets from reading a book.
The American Psychological Association (APA) confirmed the downtrend in the reading habit among the young. Citing the work of a San Diego State University professor, the APA said that the steep decline in reading print media among the young was observed in the early 1990s.
Since then, students have been using more of their time texting or surfing the internet. The APA research expressed grave concern over this trend. It said, “Think about how difficult it must be to read even five pages of an 800-page college textbook when you’ve been used to spending most of your time switching between one digital activity and another in a matter of seconds.”
“There is no lack of intelligence among young people,” the report pointed out,” but they do have less experience focusing for longer periods and reading long-form text.”
It underscored: “Being able to read long-form text is crucial for understanding complex issues and developing critical thinking skills”.
Is this ability important?
Yes, the APA study said. It explained, “Democracies need informed voters and involved citizens who can think through issues, and that can be more difficult for people of all ages now that online information is the norm.”
Let’s help our children rediscover the ability to read books and hone their critical reading skills. (antipolocitygov@gmail.com)