Pay Them! (A literate generation?)

Name: leahslad

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Product:	A literate generation?
Date:	16/10/01 (107 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Learn to read online, Interact with others , Childs education!!!

Disadvantages: Square eyes, Phone bill

Oh dear, I seem to have put my entire opinion into my title....

There's a common belief that books are the source of all knowledge, a necessity to our education and a great way to spend your spare time. Its not surprising therefore that we find anything that competes for that precious reading time is villified by all around. In fact it has become a national 'problem' that our children dont read enough.

I'm here to argue that perhaps reading isnt all its cracked up to be, I mean what good does it do us?

When we read a book all we get is ideas from an authors mind and an insight into some totally useless idea that could maybe save lives or create a better place for the world. If we read factual books all we learn is how to do something or what someone has managed to achieve over a sustained period of time giving us inspiration in our everyday lives. If we read a Biography we only read what someone else has done, we didnt do it and the only thing its useful for is finding out what mistakes and good things other people have made.

In the end books are nothing but a mere small learning curve, a source of information that we can actually get almost anywhere, instead of reading Beckhams autobiography we could just go and speak to the lad for instance.....

Right, its time to cut out the sarcasm now, we all know books are valuable sources of information and we all know that we can learn a lot from them, especially factual ones which are able to broaden our minds, but just how important is reading in todays era?

We keep getting complaints from a minority that our children play too many video games but personally I think this one is outdated. Video games do take up a certain amount of a childs time at the moment but there are other things now taking over, one of them being the interenet.

Via the worlds largest database of information children are now doing all sorts of things and most o
f them involve reading. If they are in a chat room then what are they doing? They're READING what other people say and writing replies, broadening their vocabulary from the massive number of people from different cultural backgrounds that they talk to. Never mind David 'I've got 20 bodyguards and a nanny' Beckham, our children are talking to Sahat Mahoul from India who's explaining how he's a human and also loves girls but his religion bans him seeing them.....

They also get to play games online, usually having to READ the instructions first. Perhaps its emails we're arguing about, where they have to READ the emails from friends and construct a valid reply.

If you ask me, we've gone beyond computer games now, the technological era has given us the internet and now we need to make full use of it. If our children want to sit in front of a screen all day then let them, I'd rather they were online under my supervision typing away to a girl in outer mongolia than sat watching the teletubbies with their disjointed 'lala' and 'whoo doo'.

You can argue all you like about how good books are, but nothing can beat personal accounts and the ability to ask questions as you go and have things explained until you understand. Even our small children have a place on the internet of today, under supervision a child learning to read can perhaps send emails to friends and with your help can reply to them, send and recieve all sorts of things. We still need to supervise to make sure they dont wonder onto the wrong pages but surely thats not too much to ask.

We have a simple choice right now, get them to read books in a stuffy library which many children hate going to anyway or plug them into the internet and let them talk, read and chat away to their hearts content, they wont even realise they are learning and yet all the time they will be finding out all sorts of new things. If you want
to teach them something in particular or put them on lessons then you can even stick them onto the playdays sight or another similar one and away they go. They'll be happy and through doing this they can also learn how to use a computer, something thats vital in todays world, and likely to be even more vital in the future.

It may be a bad choice for some, but the internet is the best method we have of getting our children to read and enjoy learning, lets use it. Who knows, maybe it'll even get them interested in those stuffy old libraries when one of their friends tells them about a book they read.....

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