Slashdot Mirror
Learning To Read With Click and Jane
theodp writes "While earlier generations learned to Read with Dick and Jane, the NYT Magazine reports that today's tykes are getting their reading chops at online sites like Starfall (free) and One More Story (subscription). Quoting the Times Magazine: 'In their book "Freakonomics," Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt write that kids who grow up in houses packed with books fare better on school tests than those who grow up with fewer books.' So how will kids who learn to read online fare when they grow up?"
For one, even shorter attention spans than today ...
Second, they'll want to see a [citation needed], and if it's not on the net, they'll refuse to believe it exists.
Third, since they won't be "into dead tree newspapers", expect to see a rise in the number of people who bring their laptops into the john with them ... and also expect to hear more of "the sound of one hand clapping" ...
Fourth, most "science projects" will degenerate into "does it blend"?
Fifth, teachers will have to accept "a virus ate my homework" since they'll be saying "a virus ate your final mark" much of the time.
These days I believe being able to use a computer is nearly as important as knowing how to read. I believe a combination of books and online tools is the best. My kids would sit and listen to me read to them all day if I were up to it so I'm glad there are sites like Starfall that give them additional interaction.
That may be true, but it's not enough to tell which is the cause and which is effect. It could be that money is needed to buy books, and maybe poor people would have other priorities.
An alternative explanation would be that intelligent people read more, and intelligent people are more likely to be wealthy, because few people like being poor and if one's intelligent enough one will find ways to avoid poverty.
It could be that having books is a consequence of being wealthy, or being wealthy is a consequence of having books, or they are both consequences of another factor.
And what if having kids that do well in school is a cause, not a consequence, of having books at home? Because if kids do well at school they will have an incentive to read more, and will ask their parents to buy more books?
Thing is, that if a family has a lot of books in their house, they are probably are reasonably wealthy. (In particular, not working class. In other words, people with money have kids that tend to do better in school.
I'd say that a family that has a lot of books in their house probably gives a shit about learning things whether they're wealthy or not. When I was a kid, we were frequently at or below the poverty line in terms of family income, and my parents had never been wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, but we had thousands of books in the house--far more than any of my friends with wealthy parents.
I'm sure there's a correlation between wealth and academic performance, but it's probably two effects from the same cause in most cases: the parents have a habit of learning things, and that makes them more likely to have better jobs and children that care about learning.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
I grew up in a house full of books. I will say my parents were above average, but not by that much. My dad worked in a mill, my mom was a housewife. They had high school educations.
At some point dad's younger co-workers asked what he did to encourage his kids to read -- "When they picked up a book, I didn't bat it out of their hands." That's fairly accurate. Dad and mom were pretty normal TV-watching suburbanites, but they also liked to read. Newspapers, novels, sci-fi, magazines, history -- it wasn't something special.
What /was/ different is we had a good local library and went there weekly, just like groceries. I picked up my parents' habit of simply getting a large stack of whatever looked interesting, and finding out if it was interesting during the week. That access to variety was key.
The internet delivers that variety. Like libraries it is terrific access for young minds. But just like when I was a kid, only a certain percentage will turn out to be avid readers of thoughtful sources. Most won't. IMHO you should only expect a small increase representing the kids who would be avid readers but previously didn't have much access.
I learned how to type and spell because of playing video games. That was MUDs though. I sometimes wonder how things will be different with newer games. It seems like people will still need to learn to type fairly quickly to play a game like WoW (at least if they want to be in a group), but it's not like a MUD where you have to spell everything perfectly because you're talking to a computer.
...the techs call this babysitware. it has nothing to do with education and everything to do with a teachers union who demands teachers "need a break". couple this with computer lab aides who get paid under 10 bucks an hour and aren't technically allowed to teach anything.
THL phish sticks
My mother also would often send me and my siblings to a local library after school so we would could get my homework done. In retrospect, that was one of the smartest decisions she ever made in raising me. It sure beat what I am sure is the insane cost of daycare, and it pretty much forced me to do my schoolwork. Even if for some reason I didn't want to do my homework, well, guess what, the only thing else to do at that point was read one of the hundreds of books sitting around me. Either way I ended up becoming a more educated individual, a definite win-win if there ever was one.
Your comment is total BS. 2nd generation 'working class', we get by paycheck to paycheck, and that didn't keep us from acquiring a 4000+ volume library over the years - some from my own childhood.
You appear to have fallen into the old pitfall of "taking statistics personally." You may have done an awesome job of exceeding the expected educational outcomes for your tax bracket, and you may even have found it pretty easy.
And it does nothing to change the fact that people with money generally have more books than people without.
I'm not so sure.
While I have little doubt that children growing on the web will be able to read very well in the most literal sense, I'm not so sure they will be 'literate' as we know that term.
The web provides invaluable access to information - it is accessible, global, searchable and 'to the point'. It may encourage a type of learning that is less narrative than we've historically used, and more... staccato, for lack of a better term. You can jump from fact to fact without necessarily going through a lot of research in the process, because the accumulated data of humanity is, well, searchable.
There is less need to develop the comprehension skills needed to reach new conclusions from existing data, because all the conclusions already reached are more easily accessible already. There is less need to develop the curiosity or habit of erudition, because the cost of researching answers for any question on-demand has become much lower than the equivalent cost of acquiring a broad/general education in advance.
In that sense, I have no doubt new generations will be reading something. But I'm not sure they will be 'reading' in the same sense we typically use the word now, as a shorthand for literacy.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
But did you know that there are many places around the world where you can have access to 200,000 or more books, for free? Its called a library. And while not everyone can afford books, almost anyone can go into a public library and read all they want.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
...people with money generally have more books than people without.
Within the context established by previous posts (where 'people without money' == 'working class'), above quote is a bald-faced assertion and more than likely wrong.
From what I've seen of middle class life styles in America, most people in the USA who have significant disposable income have more space devoted to their collections of CDs, DVDs, and computer games than they do in bookshelves. And then there is the camper with the water ski boat on the trailer, the TV in every room, the gaming computer for each family member, and the multiple iPods. With all that to play with, there is not a whole lot of time left for reading, so of course a big home library is not that important to the lifestyle.
A single bookcase in the study does not a home library make. A working class home with boxes of used paperbacks stacked in the corners of the living room and the bedrooms, brought home from the Goodwill Store, is a more literate home.
There are an awful lot of people in the USA who are living close to the hand to mouth level who are more literate than most of the upper middle class. Books, especially used paperbacks, are cheaper and in many ways much more satisfying entertainment than the unaffordable toys of the middle class.