90. Reading and writing
[From Seth Godin, Stop Stealing Dreams http://www.squidoo.com/stop-stealing-dreams]
In the connected age, reading and writing remain the two skills that are most likely to pay off with exponential results.
Reading leads to more reading. Writing leads to better writing. Better writing leads to a bigger audience and more value creation. And the process repeats.
Typical industrial schooling kills reading. Among Americans, the typical high school graduate reads no more than one book a year for fun, and a huge portion of the population reads zero. No books! For the rest of their lives, for 80 years, bookless.
When we associate reading with homework and tests, is it any wonder we avoid it?
But reading is the way we open doors. If our economy and our culture grows based on the exchange of ideas and on the interactions of the informed, it fails when we stop reading.
At the Harlem Village Academy, every student (we’re talking fifth graders and up) readsfifty books a year. If you want to teach kids to love being smart, you must teach them to love to read.
If the non-advantaged kids in Harlem can read fifty books a year, why can’t your kids? Why can’t you?
If every school board meeting and every conversation with a principal started with that simple question, imagine the progress we’d make as a culture. What would our world be like if we read a book a week, every week?
Writing is the second half of the equation. Writing is organized, permanent talking, it is the brave way to express an idea. Talk comes with evasion and deniability and vagueness. Writing, though, leaves no room to wriggle. The effective writer in the connected revolution can see her ideas spread to a hundred or a million people. Writing (whether in public, now that everyone has a platform, or in private, within organizations) is the tool we use to spread ideas. Writing activates the most sophisticated part of our brains and forces us to organize our thoughts.
Teach a kid to write without fear and you have given her a powerful tool for the rest of her life. Teach a kid to write boring book reports and standard drivel and you’ve taken something precious away from a student who deserves better.
Tags: stopstealingdreams
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