Even if its Harry Potter

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE do not read as much as they once did. Blame it on hundreds of channels of cable television. Blame it on the internet. On average, americans read about one book per capita beyond high school, which means that a huge percentage of americans never read another book after the age of eighteen.

From the moment I learned to read, i was hooked, and still am. A little over a year ago I finally got rid of cable television, and haven't even bothered to install rabbit ears allowing me to pick up local channels. It just doesn't seem to matter anymore. Too much corporate brainwashing on television. Too many sexy talkers telling me how enriched my life could be, if only i would make..one...more...
purchase. And don't even get me started about the tidal wave of gratuitous sex and violence, again designed only to separate me from my meager money.

My reading list has never been better, or longer. During the past eighteen months I have finished  long overdue dates with hemingway and steinbeck, poured through dickens, and even revisited tom sawyer and huckleberry finn, all the while maintaining my always impressive list of science fiction reads. I had never read the classic pro socialist labor novel "The Jungle". Now I have. I'm not looking back, at least not until my eyes give out, or television becomes intelligent.

In american high schools, the classics are no longer rammed down the bored throats of teenagers with such daunting persistence as they once were. Now students are allowed, even encouraged to read what they want, which usually means harry potter, Thrones, and other fantasy. During the last century the reading level of adolescents has declined by about three grade levels.

See for yourself. Read the letters and diaries of teenagers from nineteenth century america. It will shock you. The penmanship is calligraphic, and the diction is astoundingly mature. Letters home from eighteen year old civil war soldiers reveal high levels of education and writing skills, even  among those with little formal education.

But what else can we do? They lived in a world in which hard bound books and pens were high technology, without the distraction of television. Those who learned to read and write in the nineteenth century and before, did so all out, sparing nothing in their upward intellectual mobility.

WE live in an era in which education consists of leaning how to use a computer; there is no more important skill for us to learn, quite frankly. A twenty first century student need not read shakespeare or Homer, or even the bible, to learn twenty first century job skills, but must, above all else, learn to use a computer.

And yet, in the face of all that, public libraries are still alive and well, books are still published on paper at a greater rate then ever before, and we modern folk still speak and write email to each other with some degree of intelligence, if in a crass and truncated style. But whatever it takes to keep us reading, let''s take it, even if its harry potter.