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Literacy begins in the home
Oct. 26th, 2008 06:33 pmPosting this in response to a justified rant by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
torakiyoshi on the functional illiteracy of so many students in America.
The complete absence of writing skills has just as much to do with a lack of global Weltanschauung as it does to poor teaching skills within the English classroom. The foundation of good writing is a hunger for knowledge and expansive, voracious, eclectic reading. We emulate that which we know and appreciate.
When our children were little, we would make at least three trips to the library per week, and bring back 20 books or so each time. My youngest boy was reading the KJV aloud to me at the age of 5, his mother having worked with him for a couple of weeks while I was abroad on a trip. When he was 17, he began working on a fantasy novel of his own, which for various reasons got set aside but ( click here for a sample )
Not bad for a 17-year-old. And the story was darn captivating, too - He put out the Prolog and Chapter 1, and I hung around with bated breath waiting for more to appear, because I wanted to see what happened.
The point of all this is that Mike was a voracious reader. He sought out Moby Dick by himself and enjoyed it, and Melville is not easy for many people far older than he. But you can't raise children on a diet of video games, using the TV as a babysitter, and expect them to put together a coherent sentence.
So while I understand your frustration and agree that there is much to be done, I posit that more needs to be done in homes long before the rug rats ever get inside a classroom. That's where the appreciation for the beauty of language begins. I for one am grateful that I can pick up a piece of writing by the likes of Eudora Welty or Walter van Tilburg Clark and be moved to tears as much by the beauty of the linguistic craftsmanship as by the tale itself...
torakiyoshi on the functional illiteracy of so many students in America.The complete absence of writing skills has just as much to do with a lack of global Weltanschauung as it does to poor teaching skills within the English classroom. The foundation of good writing is a hunger for knowledge and expansive, voracious, eclectic reading. We emulate that which we know and appreciate.
When our children were little, we would make at least three trips to the library per week, and bring back 20 books or so each time. My youngest boy was reading the KJV aloud to me at the age of 5, his mother having worked with him for a couple of weeks while I was abroad on a trip. When he was 17, he began working on a fantasy novel of his own, which for various reasons got set aside but ( click here for a sample )
Not bad for a 17-year-old. And the story was darn captivating, too - He put out the Prolog and Chapter 1, and I hung around with bated breath waiting for more to appear, because I wanted to see what happened.
The point of all this is that Mike was a voracious reader. He sought out Moby Dick by himself and enjoyed it, and Melville is not easy for many people far older than he. But you can't raise children on a diet of video games, using the TV as a babysitter, and expect them to put together a coherent sentence.
So while I understand your frustration and agree that there is much to be done, I posit that more needs to be done in homes long before the rug rats ever get inside a classroom. That's where the appreciation for the beauty of language begins. I for one am grateful that I can pick up a piece of writing by the likes of Eudora Welty or Walter van Tilburg Clark and be moved to tears as much by the beauty of the linguistic craftsmanship as by the tale itself...
