How to get your child to read? How can you help me start reading? How can you finally get your child to pick up a book?
At the ordinary level, everything is simple.
There are no new recipes. Innovation is powerless here. Even Konstantin Dmitrievich Ushinsky and Anton Semyonovich Makarenko noted the "decisive power of habit" in education. The magical power of constancy, "the structures of everyday life", "water wears away the stone" … Measured, disciplined, calm (without strain and throwing), purposeful life … And the "cult of the book" (Vasily Alexandrovich Sukhomlinsky), a book (good, classical) on a pedestal, in a halo of veneration, worship.
Dad with a book. Mom with a book. The best gift is a book. Family reading traditions. Discussion of the read. TV and radio performances instead of beer advertising. Library instead of the game room. And do not miss the time. The most "responsive", sensitive age is 5 - 9 years.
Investments will pay off a hundredfold - by emotional contact with the child, sincere love - they will turn around. The books I read are “sleeping heroes” (Vasily Aleksandrovich Sukhomlinsky), from the inside, out of the child's subjectivity, they will help, protect, support, lead through life.
In the books - the soul of the people, in the days of coming trials, we and our children will need support, a core, a touchstone more than ever. Great Russian literature is an armored train of the spirit, for the time being standing under steam on a siding. But, do you hear, the calling beep is heard !!!
You say utopia, a pipe dream. "Easy to say, hard to do." It is difficult, yes it is necessary. Let us turn to the socio-psychological and even ideological level of analysis of the problem.
Reading is not a senseless, hypnotic, somnambulistic busting of TV programs. Reading is not computer surfing. Before reading, you still need to grow, run, climb.
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Reading requires concentration of focused attention, arbitrariness, volitional effort, activation of imagination and fantasy. Serious reading is not "entertaining", but the work of the soul. Reading is WORK. Before the labor of reading turns into the daily bread for our soul, into an indefatigable, self-reproducing, the sweetest need … Seven sweats must come off.
And here, the devil jumps out of the snuff-box, and laughs. Alas, in postmodern society, work is not honored.
Comfort, success at any cost, hedonism, the search for pleasure and thrills, efficiency, understood as "give less, receive more." Relaxed state. All for fun. "Live - Play". "Don't worry, don't load." It is no coincidence that young people today perceive reading as "straining", a burden, something characteristic of one of the marginal groups - "nerds", "nerds".
What to do?
To understand that "pregnancy itself will not resolve", that it is so, suddenly the children will not start reading. Self-elimination of the state, society, various imitation tricks - the road to hell. Without reading, there is no the most important ideological component of competitiveness.
The people whose children read has a historical future. The reader must be formed, the love of reading must be designed. It is necessary to launch activities at all levels to teach the child to read.
Here are just a few of the most obvious, on the surface actions:
1. Carry out reorganization, cleansing of television for children and teenagers. Introduce the most severe pedagogical censorship of information. Lawyers pass laws, economists are engaged in economics … God forbid.
But why do non-professionals climb into pedagogy, why the teacher is lowered below the plinth, why teachers condescendingly teach all and sundry, people who have never stood at the blackboard. The teacher is not a manager, not a lesson. They figured it out, the teachers of literature and that, were written down in the service sector. The teacher is the master of thoughts. Teacher - "sows reasonable, good, eternal." Teachers need to regain their dignity, find a voice, lead the struggle for the minds and souls of children.
We need a protected, developing communicative-sign environment. Take films, cartoons, songs created in the USSR. Purchase the best classics of the peoples of the world. And then the ninth wave of contradictory, unstructured information was brought down on the child. They loaded it into Internet porn content, loaded it with sociological advertisements depicting chewing, cheerful morons as a role model, proclaimed from the high rostrum "educating the consumer", and they are still surprised, bah, children don't read!
2. Stop bullying the Russian language and literature in school programs. In 1950, 15 hours were allotted for reading, calligraphy, Russian in elementary school, now from 3 to 5 hours. This is a shame and sabotage. The quality of literature is also important. Why are they confiscated, reduced hours by Sholokhov, Mayakovsky, Fadeev, Gorky … Who is being replaced? Why introduce unintelligible elective courses?
3. To return the essay as the MAIN exam in the humanities universities, as initiation, "test" for maturity, adulthood. The exam should have an alternative !!! Why, if we have a democracy, the opinion of the majority of the people is in NO way taken into account? Are we fulfilling someone's political order? Bearing the heavy burden of the obligations assumed by politicians?
And yet, perhaps most importantly, the secret. Our people have missed a big, altruistic historical cause. The spiritual is above the material. Mutual aid, the brotherhood of people is above cave individualism. A person was born for happiness, dreams, struggle, heroism. Down with the lukewarmness of tolerance - tolerance for vice, lies, hatred, malice. I really hope that Russian literature will wake up, wake up from the postmodern black haze. "It's time, beauty, wake up!" Once again, as always, sing of heroes like Taras Bulba, Pavka Korchagin, Alexei Meresiev …
And there, on the edge of the horizon, may Don Quixote meet them, and with a song they will go to meet the sun, to their reader.
Mikhail Telegin, Associate Professor, Moscow State University of Psychology and Education, Head of the "Philosophy for Children" sector
