Great Thinkers thinking greatly

"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over

the man who cannot read them." Mark Twain

Today I attended the first of a series of inspiring workshops. The starting point for the workshop caught my ear with its Fahrenheit 451 overtones and reminiscence of Mark Twain wisdom. To be fair, the gentleman running the workshop was a high school English teacher for 30 years before moving to the University of Pennsylvania, so he "had me at hello," literally.

The opening piece was an excerpt from Rushworth Kidder's book "Reinventing the Future: Global Goals for the 21 st Century." He states a valid, yet unheeded worry about why people should read, but don't:
                

       "It is that they read for wisdom, for depth, for a conscious acquaintance with the values and judgements of great thinkers thinking greatly. The tragedy of illiteracy - and even greater waste of alliteracy, involving those who know how to read seriously but don't - is that it abandons the accumulated wisdom of the ages. It places fine writing in the hands of fewer and fewer interpreters, whose translations and commentaries become progressively oversimplified - and whose audience, increasingly unable to think for itself, grows more and more susceptible to the manipulations of the elite.

       "Are we headed, then, backwards into the pre-print attitudes of the Middle Ages, when the literate few ruled the illiterate many?....To avert such backsliding, [our educational focus] must be given over to two things: training people how to read, and teaching them why they should want to read..."
This does not mean people have to read more than anything else.

This does not mean people are not smart unless they read abundantly.

I am one of the most avid readers I know, but even I am guilty of this! Sure, reading lends me exposure to a wide range of views and ideas, but I am as guilty as the next person when it comes to shrugging off what I should be reading because I do not want to be bothered with the responsibility, I'm too busy, or I figure it doesn't matter if I do or not. Recently my mom told me I should read a finance/business book. The authors had predicted the current conditions of the housing market and our other economic issues two years before they happened and now the authors have a new book that shows us where the economy will go from here. Probably worth looking into, but what did I tell her? "You read it, make a list of things I should do, and let me know."

What happens when the trustworthy on such topics, such as my mom, become few in my life - or in the world in general? To whom can I turn for this information - on whom will we all rely?

What this means is that people need to realize the importance behind reading and use it as needed at the very least.  More and more people make decisions based on what they hear or see on TV, without ever gathering, reading, and critically thinking through the materials themselves. Why do campaigners place signs in people's yards? Because people will recognize the name and short list of facts at the voting booth and simply mark that name down because they've heard it before.

By losing the ability to comprehend and think critically about what we read, we set ourselves up for failure. If the trend continues, we are lambs gladly led to the slaughter. Men like Bradbury, Orwell, and Huxley were not pulling crazy ideas out of thin air. They could see this coming and now it is ours with which to deal.