| >Reading was replaced by movies and shows on demand and wont come back no matter what educators or parents do. ... huh? I'm a parent and this just isn't true. My wife and I have phones, our young children do not. We do not own a tablet. Our children have never known what it's like to have the option of resorting to a screen to keep them busy when we're out of the house. TV time is limited on the weekends, extra limited on the weeknights. My oldest absolutely loves reading, and I watched her sit in the corner for 90 minutes on Sunday with a pile of books and a massive grin on her face the whole time. My youngest is still too young to read, but I'm hoping for results within the same realm. Your comment about there frequently not being much else to do? It's up to parents to, for lack of a better phrase, teach kids how to be bored. Edit: >It's cheaper, easily available and more fun. What's super fun, easily available and free for us is going to a park on the weekend to play and have lunch, and then driving around to a bunch of Little Free Libraries in the area. Drop off books we don't want, see if the kids or parents find anything that strikes our fancy. Our kiddos love it and so do we, it's great family time. |
It's great that your kids are reading, but clearly a lot of kids, and even more adults, aren't.
It's not just "up to parents" because the media, in all its forms, sets collective values.
And the strategic problem in the US is that reading - and culture in general - is caught between a number of competing ideologies, most of which are destructive to what's usually understood as education both in and out of school.
What individual parents do is downstream of all of those cultural influences. It's heavily dependent on socioeconomics, opportunity, and status, with error bars that depend on a random range of individual values.
The US is a competing patchwork of wildly incompatible cultures and traditions, some of which are directly opposed to each other, and all of which - in practice - are suspicious of traditional educational goals.
Put simply, no one is driving the bus. So it's stuck in a ditch, with its wheels spinning. And it's about to burst into flames.
There's only so much individual parents can do to fix that. The problems are strategic and political, not individual, and they're much harder to fix than they seem.