The Reading Illiterate
"A reading-writing education as such has benefited nobody, has elated nobody spiritually or culturally. There is no need to go to the other extreme and to believe that the knowledge of the three R's is basically destructive, but nothing is more stupid or unrealistic than to judge the level of other countries by the number of illiterates."
And, as a corollary, nothing is more stupid or unrealistic than to judge the level of our country by the number of literates.
It reminds me of a Dear Abby column I saw earlier this year. A mother wrote, saying that she couldn't get her children to read, until she came up with this novel approach: she turned off the volume on the TV and turned on close-captioning. The result: The children had to read in order to watch TV! Dear Abby was elated with the advice and passed it onto her readers.
Such idiocy could pass for intelligence only in a culture of mass education. The three R's are valued as ends in themselves, instead of means to greater things. Reading for the sake of reading is about as healthy as eating for the sake of eating. Eating of any sort is good as opposed to starving, and reading of any sort (even the close-captioned reading) is better than no reading, but a diet of potato chips and ice cream doesn't benefit a person's health in the long-run, just as a diet of newspapers and dime-store novels doesn't benefit a person's mind in the long run.
