Wednesday, December 7, 2011

If books die, what happens to Imagination?

I don't know if reading will ever go away. We will always need words in order to convey meaning in society. Books however seem to be becoming more and more scarce. I am a tutor for a second grade class and it is amazing to me how little these kids read. The only time they pick up a book, is during school, and when they read in class they can barely stumble through a few sentences. I remember my friends and I were starting the Harry Potter books in second grade!  I've heard that reading levels are declining in the country and it makes sense to me. When kids get home from school, they watch tv, get online, play games on their parents iPads and all sorts of digital stuff. Whatever happened to grabbing up a book and taking yourself to far away lands to live in an adventure?

I don't know if people will ever stop reading novels and books. As long as there is imagination, there will be stories to tell. And as long as there are stories to tell, there will hopefully be stories to write and stories to read. The greatest of all stories cannot be contained into an hour and a half movie. Our world is bound together by stories... real life stories in history, sucess stories, adventures, fairy tales, love, friendship. Now the binding of the world is less and less about stories and is being thread into the binding of social media, movies, YouTube. Families are starting to bond by watching TV and movies, instead of reading together. The world cannot live on pictures alone. Movies are incredible, don't get me wrong, but they don't involve any imagination, it's force feeding every element into the mind. If I have one hope, it is that if books die, that imagination will still be kept alive somehow.

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