(no subject)

[deckardcanine]

Lately I’ve thought about all those pro-reading messages geared toward kids. They aren’t talking about all reading—not signs, manuals, textbooks, newspapers, magazines, or graphic novels—just literature of the type you’d encounter in English class. Does any other medium in the world get advertised half as much, or at all? (I speak of the entire medium; individual samples don’t count.) Sure, popular media like TV and movies don’t need any encouragement, but what about other media that kids don’t flock to right away, like sculpture and opera?

Eh, I suppose it’s a matter of accessibility. Sculpture requires a studio. An opera is usually expensive to attend, comes only at certain times and places, and rarely appeals to kids’ attention spans. You can easily take a book of an appropriate reading level with you (especially now in electronic form) and read a few pages whenever you have time to kill.

Still, it doesn’t bode well that books alone call for shilling. It got me to consider just how uniquely valuable the medium is. Research tells me that before the advent of TV, books had about the same reputation as TV. Are they romanticized simply for their relative age? I do see advantages—fewer contributors per work, greater capacity for length, more room for audience imagination—but probably every medium has its advantages.

Perhaps more important is the question of how effective the pro-reading messages are. I enjoyed “Reading Rainbow” as a kid, but how much did it contribute to my reading when my parents were doing their part to get me interested? My teen years had me tuning in to “Wishbone” partly so I could get the gist of classics without reading them. (Who was that show for, anyway? It was presented simply enough for early elementary schoolers, but most of those books were way above their level.) And while “Read It and Weep” is one of my favorite episodes of “My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic,” using an Indiana Jones-style adventure only made the screen look better.

Francois Truffaut allegedly said that any attempt at an anti-war film would backfire by making the horrors of war look cool. I suspect there’s a similar problem with pro-reading messages: Even library posters tend to rely on illustrations of the imagination to get their point across. If you merely show someone reading, it looks pretty boring. If you add anything more, you admit that the present medium has an advantage.

Comments

[nefaria.livejournal.com]

The best way to get kids to read is to provide them with excellent books. There's no experience like reading an excellent book; it's as powerful as seeing a Shakespeare play or a Best Picture movie, but completely different, because the reader is providing much of the entertainment from his/her own imagination.