You Need To Teach Them To Read

Probably your single most vital undertaking as a parent is to instill a love of words, a desire to read in your child.  Awakening a love of words, a desire to hear stories, to learn and to know, is a critical necessity for the support and progress of civilization. You can convey a limited amount of information with pictures, but without words, even a simple movie loses most of it information and meaning.

Human knowledge is coded in words, and their brother, mathematics, and any who can’t attain a minimal fluency in them is doomed to an illiterate, third class status. You are denied the accumulated store of human experience and discovery, and will play no meaningful role in the march of progress.

Words convey society’s highest moral accomplishments, our values and dreams. Your own family history is lost without words, as is your nation’s and its people’s. Your task is not to pass on the entire store of human knowledge, but to give your child the skills necessary to access it. And the will to wish to do so. You do that by sitting and reading Winnie-The -Pooh to your child, not War And Peace. It doesn’t have to be a chore, it just has to be done!

Jack