Thankful For Literacy (11-19-07)

On Friday, our K-8 students celebrated National Reading Day. During this day, every student read…and read…and read. Students read to themselves, read to others, and read with others. There were reading groups, and reading pairs. Older reads to younger, and younger sometimes reads to older. Everyone read…and read…and read.

Throughout it all, the library kept track of all the books read. Our goal this year was for everyone to read 1200 books. At last count, our K-8 students had read over 1300, and that was before afternoon recess.

The best part about National Reading Day was the smiles - the laughter - the excitement and the visible joy. In this electronic age of video games and camera phones and text messaging and YouTube and a million other technical distractions, reading still holds a place in our children’s hearts. While television, movies, and video games now show kids fantastic characters and worlds, often down to the most mundane detail, those visions are the product of someone else’s imagination. We live in a wondrous age, where practically every major or important or popular work of literature has been adapted to the screen or to the computer, where literary characters are portrayed by actors, and where every setting has been rendered in magnificent three-dimensional digital splendor.

Yet, for all that, a book allows readers to think for themselves. A book requires the reader to engage their own imaginations, to create their own worlds and characters, and to use their own inner senses to see, hear, and visualize what is being described on the page. While movies and video games have never been more magical, can anything really replace the magic of a good book? On Friday, our students certainly enjoyed the magic of reading…and reading…and reading.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the privilege to substitute for the fifth grade social studies class. We worked through the chapter about Columbus, and Cortes, and Jamestown and the pilgrims. We read about the first thanksgiving, and learned much about the Native Americans who were so instrumental in the survival of those early settlers.

As we discussed the many merits of the Native Americans, of their practice of a democratic system of self-rule, of their resilience, and of their occasional generosity, we came to realize one very important difference between the European settlers and the indigenous people. The natives did not have a written language.

Think about that. Can you imagine living in a culture where all history and all imagination must be communicated orally, where reading and writing don’t exist? No alphabet. No grammar or syntax. No books or stories or articles or essays. Not so much as a grocery list.

As we approach our annual commemoration of that first thanksgiving, we all have many reasons to give thanks. We give thanks for our families and our communities and (I hope) for our schools. We give thanks for the valiant men and women who have fought and now fight for our way of life. We give thanks for good food and good health.

But to that list, I would like to add reading. Be thankful that we belong to a society that so values, so treasures, so perpetuates the ability to read. Give thanks that our society has made reading the very keystone of our educational system. Reading has always been the prime subject taught in schools from the roots of formal education. The ancient Greeks taught reading, and reading has been taught all through the ages, all the way up through last Friday, where our Hill City students read…and read…and read.

If you can read this, then know I wish you all a very happy, and a very literate Thanksgiving!