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Yet another rant...
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Yet another rant
by bassgravi
This site *still* needs more meant because *somebody*..and I won't say who...*ahem* ....isn't updating much and has added that special little something, that personal flair, that pinache! (lol..I said pinache...)
Alrighty...another rant..hmm...what could it be? Now,if you're expecting a rant from *my* site, sorry, 'scuse me, pardon me, but I just wiped out most of the rants on that page because well...it was time. Out with the old, grimy, crusty moldy stuff, and in with new shiny rants! That said....I'll get down to business.
My rant is about nothing important, but it interests me and I have free rant-space here so here we go:
This rant is about books. Yes, books. Now, anyone who knows me can tell you I'm very very close to stepping over the line that divides book-lover and bibliophile. Yes, the definitions are startlingy similar, but there is that subtle difference. But this is ranting, it's rambling...maybe I'll continue to ramble...maybe not.
Books are things everyone in their right mind is at least remotely familiar with. They hold information, tell a story and more. Books can be a valuable resource (unless, of course...you have the internet nowadays...) and books can be amusing. All you need is to know how to piece together alpha characters to shape coherent words. Doesn't seem very hard. 26 characters, A-Z and if you know 0-9 it helps, too. You even have classifications on what is in the book, a title to help explain it, and the name of the author, just in case you want to look for other stories that popped out of their heads. So, why do you find so few books in the hands of kids these days?
Oh, I know it's an old, over-rated rant. Too much tv, too many video games, to much internet, too many amusement parks, too much mindless music. "Kids today have no imagination." Blah, blah, blah. There are a million ways to say this, a million ways to make it sound outrageous, but the honest question is who is allowing this to happen. I hear less and less about who *allows* this to happen. Have any of the "responsible parents/teachers/citizens/politicians" been in a public school lately?
Probably not. They sure as heck don't mind cutting funding though. Yeah, that's a bright idea. "Let's cut funding so the English department can't afford to provide literature to the young adults who can't afford to go pay $14 for a copy of Cold Mountain, or Their Eyes Were Watching God. Let's make sure they definately can't read the expensive Side-by-side version of Shakespearean plays that help them understand the plot because it cost almost $20. Let's be absolutely certain they can't afford to make the numerous purchases in bookstores for required reading. After all who needs to read Great Expectations, or a Tale of Two Cities? Who needs to read Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Count of Monte Cristo,Hamlet, Othello, Julius Caeser, The Taming of the Shrew, The Hobbit, Les Miserables, The Great Gatsby, The Scarlet Letter or any of the classics. For that matter, who cares about the classics? If they manage to buy any of those they definately won't be able to get the H.P. books(which are pretty good, btw, I've read them all) or anything fun like that.
Then again, why blame them. Parents aren't helping either. Here's an example: my younger brother (about 14 now) has at his fingertips: a laptop, a PS, a PS2, an X-box, Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advanced, a Gamecube and numerous games for each of them as well as another pc with internet access which I frequently see him at and I'm not even going to go into the subject of his grades. He did pretty well on the last report card...A's and B's, maybe on C and my mother was estatic! Before that...well...if it was up to me, he would have been locked in a cage with school supplies and suitable sustenance for the day after he got home from school.
Who do you think payed for all that? Now, I can't go all off on my mother, my brother's dad had a hand in it, too, but they do manage to give him a decent supply of books. I can't criticize my brother too much if he reads Tolkein in his spare time.
But most kids. Whew! My God! The bill for those video games would buy every single book I've aquired over the years and about a dozen that I just wish I had!
So what's the loss?
The loss is intelligence. Of course, this isn't related stricly to books, but what is the world coming to when a seventh grade classmate of mine passed through the year with a SECOND GRADE reading level! I'm no genius, but I was reading at what our little reading comprehension test deemed college level by my 8th grade year! How can these kids make it through school without the ability to read!? You learn the alphabet in Pre-K or Kindergarten (hopefully before if you have decent parents) and from there on you go from "See Spot Run" to How Green Was My Valley, or into Shakespeare, Dickens, Bronte or Hawthorne.
And we wonder why the people around us seem so stupid.
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Posted by:
gambit3
on
Tuesday 06 July 2004 - 16:44:50
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comments: 0
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