Reading (and writing too) has gone out of fashion! It was finally confirmed this week when a 60-something recipient of one of my news update emails, relative to both our families’ lives, stated “I didn’t have time to read it so I forwarded it to my daughter-in-lawâ€. I won’t tell you how this recipient spends her days!
Let me point out that one of the topics of my email related to the announcement from her that her grandchild was now being home schooled. When we started home educating our sons everyone (my email correspondent above and even my tolerant and liberal father!) poo-poo-ed the idea. Now it’s an exciting turn of events?
My point here is that the child being taken out of school is being taken out because she’s not up to the school’s reading standard. She will be 6 years old in two months so I’m not quite sure what ‘the problem’ is at that age! However, it is this child’s grandmother who’s not interested in……………reading! (Are my emails too wordy, too boring?)
Methinks that there are multiple generations who: just read Mills & Boone (UK romance) novels, best sellers, they may never even read a book because they get everything on their phone or computer newsfeeds and most of that is about people living in LA, New Jersey or Essex (!), or their friends’ latest Facebook announcements. In other words they are only reading the same things ‘everyone else’ is reading!
These same people also never write anything much. How on earth did they get through university? Oh I forgot, they just memorised everything and probably passed multiple choice tests, dare I say that they plagiarised (?) and they therefore……can’t think!
I realise I had a vision for my children when we started our home education programme so many years ago (over 27 years ago). My mantra was afterall “never again” — no child of mine was going to endure what I had to endure at school. I knew that they would become good readers and capable writers. I also wanted them to be thinkers, to reason things out. A far away dream was ‘maybe they’ll go to university’. I knew that they would get into a university despite being home educated I just didn’t know if their lives would take them there. But they are excellent thinkers, readers and writers!
It just seems to me that there are several generations that actually had no long term vision for their children and now for their grandchildren. It’s as though they think it all happens by itself. “It’s not my job†is their mantra.
Like parents whose children are in care not knowing that if their baby isn’t allowed on the floor in their earliest months – drum roll please: their mobility is delayed because their limbs and bodies are rendered too weak by spending too mnay hours a day on a squishy surface or in a container – I see it every day!
So that is why children and their parents aren’t reading and writing: no vision for the future. And it all starts so early. Parents don’t understand the connection between mind and body from the earliest days!
A delayed body = a delayed mind. We’re just so used to ‘delays’ now being the norm.
Not reading and writing is now the norm.