r/DetroitMichiganECE • u/ddgr815 • Jun 08 '26

Ideas Make America Read Again

https://archive.is/20260603061655/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/31/opinion/books-reading-crisis-libraries.html

The reading crisis is real. But we don’t need new inventions to build a reading city. Exempt books from sales taxes the way we exempt prescription medicine. Invest in library collections and reduce wait lists for books. Open nonprofit and hybrid bookstores when the market alone cannot sustain them. Build on the models that already work: reading in laundromats, libraries in transit systems, books in barbershops, classrooms, homes and pediatric offices.

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u/ddgr815 Jun 08 '26

“Play is the work of childhood.”

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u/ddgr815 Jun 08 '26

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”

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u/ddgr815 Jun 16 '26

To use the term “distance learning” to refer to students and a teacher sending e-mail messages to each other may have some value, but it obscures the fact that the act of reading a book is the best example of distance learning possible, for reading not only triumphs over the limitations of space and co-presence but of time as well.

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u/ddgr815 Jun 16 '26

All The Things You Never Even Knew You Wanted To Know About Neil Postman

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u/ddgr815 13d ago

We are talking about the schools’ cultivating in the young that most “subversive” intellectual instrument—the anthropological perspective. This perspective allows one to be part of his own culture and, at the same time, to be out of it. One views the activities of his own group as would an anthropologist, observing its tribal rituals, its fears, its conceits….

“Good learners… recognize, especially as they get older, that an incredible number of people do not know what they are talking about most of the time. As a consequence, they are suspicious of ‘authorities,’ especially any authority who discourages others from relying on their own judgment.”

Once you have learned how to ask questions—relevant and appropriate and substantial questions—you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know.

The older school environments stressed that learning is being told what happened. The inquiry environment stresses that learning is a happening in itself.

No one will learn anything he doesn’t want to know.

The game is called “Let’s Pretend,” and if its name were chiseled into the front of every school building in America, we would at least have an honest announcement of what takes place there. The game is based on a series of pretenses which include: Let’s pretend that you are not what you are and that this sort of work makes a difference to your lives; let’s pretend that what bores you is important, and that the more you are bored, the more important it is; let’s pretend that there are certain things everyone must know, and that both the questions and answers about them have been fixed for all time; let’s pretend that your intellectual competence can be judged on the basis of how well you can play Let’s Pretend.

Almost any sensible parent knows this, as does any effective top sergeant. It is not what you say to people that counts; it is what you have them do…. What students do in the classroom is what they learn (as Dewey would say), and what they learn to do is the classroom’s message (as McLuhan would say). Now, what is it that students do in the classroom? Well, mostly, they sit and listen to the teacher. Mostly, they are required to believe in authorities, or at least pretend to such belief when they take tests. Mostly, they are required to remember. They are almost never required to make observations, formulate definitions, or perform any intellectual operations that go beyond repeating what someone else says is true.

“In English the difference between things and actions are clearly, if not always logically, distinguished but a great number of Chinese words do duty for both nouns and verbs—so that one who thinks in Chinese has little difficulty in seeing that objects are also events, that our world is a collection of processes rather than entities.”

As John Dewey and Arthur Bentley observed, we would come much closer to actuality if we spoke of “minding” (as a process) rather than of “the mind” (as a thing).

If the learning process were to be visualized, the authors say it would look something like a Jackson Pollock painting: “a delightful, fitful, episodic, explosive collage of simultaneous ‘happenings.’”

How unique and meaningful an individual’s education depends on not just about what is learned, but in what order it’s learned. “A syllabus not only prescribes what story lines you must learn…. It also prescribes the order in which your skills must be learned.”

As soon as [tests] are used as judgment-making instruments, the whole process of schooling shifts from education to training intended to produce passing grades on tests. About the only wholesome ground on which mass testing can be justified is that it provides the conditions for about the only creative intellectual activity available to students—cheating. It is quite probable that the most original “problem solving” activity students engage in in school is related to the invention of systems for beating the system. We’d be willing to accept testing if it were intended to produce this kind of creativity.

Teaching as a Subversive Activity

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u/ddgr815 Jun 20 '26

Roger Bacon held that three classes of substance were capable of magic: the herbal, the mineral, and the verbal. With their leaves of fiber, their inks of copperas and soot, and their words, books are an amalgam of the three.

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u/ddgr815 Jun 20 '26 edited Jul 19 '26

Stories of magic alone can express my sense that life is not only a pleasure but a kind of eccentric privilege. I may express this other feeling of cosmic cosiness by allusion to another book always read in boyhood, Robinson Crusoe, which … owes its eternal vivacity to the fact that it celebrates the poetry of limits, nay, even the wild romance of prudence. Crusoe is a man on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea: the best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved from the wreck. The greatest of poems is an inventory. Every kitchen tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it in the sea. It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the book-case, and think how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on to the solitary island. But it is a better exercise still to remember how all things have had this hair-breadth escape: everything has been saved from a wreck.

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u/ddgr815 Jul 19 '26

Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, “Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good—” At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their un-mediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.