Click!
Oh be still because my poor heart just freakin' stopped! I was going through my childrens' papers from school - the tons and tons of recyclable material where you have to decide what is the picture that they've been scribbling with their friends and what is the grades that the teachers want signed and returned and then I found
Scholastic CLICK! Interactive Learning Club(r)
It LOOKS like the old book club, but it's not. There's not a book in there. All CD-Roms.
No books.
Holy GEEZ!!!
Now, I'm not going to waste your reading time ranting about what you well know is going to be my point, so I'll just reiterate it simply:
this is the Death of Literacy, when Scholastic no longer sends out book orders but instead gives our children the choice of video games to play. And don't even bother to give me this "Oh well, interactive CD games help them learn!!"
Bullcrud!! CD games, however instructive that they may be, teach them how to PLAY not to READ. My children are going to be adults in about 5 minutes at the rate they're growing and they still spell "because" as "cause" and "cheaper" as "chipper" and it's all because
they don't READ.
Again, I could go on all day about how reading builds the imaginative skills to envision a world not your own, much more precisely and personally to the individual than seeing what some programmer has envisioned for a world, which builds synaptic links and cognitive skills, all the while impoorving the literacy and knowledge of our language, which at the end of the day is really the only part of our culture that we truly pass to our descendants. And I could rant and rave until froth spills out of my mouth talking about how when we don't encourage our children to read and thus be literate that in fact we are dooming them to a world of insipid moronic text messages and bad spelling and to tell you the truth, we are dooming them to being unable to think
coherently and intelligently.
So, for those of you who have stuck with me this morning, what have we learned today?
Reading makes you SMART
Not reading makes you DUMB.
If you can read this, thank God you paid attention in school (or learned to read on your own!)
VG
Scholastic CLICK! Interactive Learning Club(r)
It LOOKS like the old book club, but it's not. There's not a book in there. All CD-Roms.
No books.
Holy GEEZ!!!
Now, I'm not going to waste your reading time ranting about what you well know is going to be my point, so I'll just reiterate it simply:
this is the Death of Literacy, when Scholastic no longer sends out book orders but instead gives our children the choice of video games to play. And don't even bother to give me this "Oh well, interactive CD games help them learn!!"
Bullcrud!! CD games, however instructive that they may be, teach them how to PLAY not to READ. My children are going to be adults in about 5 minutes at the rate they're growing and they still spell "because" as "cause" and "cheaper" as "chipper" and it's all because
they don't READ.
Again, I could go on all day about how reading builds the imaginative skills to envision a world not your own, much more precisely and personally to the individual than seeing what some programmer has envisioned for a world, which builds synaptic links and cognitive skills, all the while impoorving the literacy and knowledge of our language, which at the end of the day is really the only part of our culture that we truly pass to our descendants. And I could rant and rave until froth spills out of my mouth talking about how when we don't encourage our children to read and thus be literate that in fact we are dooming them to a world of insipid moronic text messages and bad spelling and to tell you the truth, we are dooming them to being unable to think
coherently and intelligently.
So, for those of you who have stuck with me this morning, what have we learned today?
Reading makes you SMART
Not reading makes you DUMB.
If you can read this, thank God you paid attention in school (or learned to read on your own!)
VG
posted by Verble Gherulous at 9/27/2007 07:40:00 am
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