Over the years many pastimes have died like hopscotch, baseball, and recreational baking. All of these are fading away, while video games, television and other electronic devices turn perfectly good brains into goop.
American citizens are in a era where text messages are the most exciting things they read in a given day.
Reading is not just a dying pastime. For all intents and purposes, it’s dead. It’s a rotting corpse beaten with a stick by Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo.
Electronics have destroyed one of the best ways to train the mind.
According to csun.edu “the average American home has the television on for six hours and 47 minutes.” That’s roughly seven hours parked in front of the moving picture box.
The average American high school student’s day has about eight hours spent sleeping, seven hours spent in front of a television, and only two hours doing homework. Pick up a five-hour shift at work, and there’s 22 hours of the day down the toilet.
Does anybody believe those last two hours are free time spent with the latest Jodi Picoult novel?
It seems books have been completely dropped. Unless it’s a textbook, the majority of students will blatantly refuse to pick up books.
Television, video games, and movies have eliminated the need for an imagination, and now students are considered “above average” if they can tell the teacher the main characters in Twilight.
Not bashing Twilight, but since when has teenage vampire romance been on par with the mandatory pieces of literature that students tend to hate?
Mandatory reading used to lead to recreational reading. Now mandatory reading leads to frustration and deep feelings of hatred for anything without pictures.
English teachers, students aren’t reading your required reading not because they can’t, but because a huge majority of them just don’t want to.
Reading opens doors to the mind that electronics couldn’t even hope to touch. Reading leads to imagination, which leads to innovation, which leads to change.
Change has been everyone’s favorite word for the past few months, and very few people are willing to pick one of the few things that can grant the power to effect it.
Jordan Culver is a first year newspaper student from Philadelphia. He can be reached at famuanopinions@gmail.com.