CENSORSHIPThere is more than one way to burn a book.
You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
...I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from [Fahrenheit 451]. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. ("Coda" 1979)
EDUCATION
The main problem is with our education, of course. First-grade teachers for many years now have not been teaching reading and we have to encourage them to pull up their socks and begin to pay attention so that the whole school system doesn't go to hell. People are getting into high school who can't read. It's stupid, isn't it? It's crazy.With computers, kids can connect and search libraries and the Encyclopedia Britannica, but if you don't teach them to read in the first place, they're not going to [log on], are they? (Speech to National School Board Association, 1995)
THE FUTURE
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Have you read any of Spider Robinson's books? (SiFi) I am particularly fond of "Time Pressure" and the line "God is an iron." A rough paraphrase of the explaination:
If you comit a felony you are a felon, if you practice gluttony, you are a gluton. God is an iron.
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my ex and i read voraciously. our son has no hope ;)
i could go on about what's going wrong in education ... i did the teching diploma last year. so disillusioned that i'm still trying to motivate myself to finish it ...
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Actually it's interesting to see the effect of what the phenomenal rise in the price of books over the last decade is having on young readers. The price of books is no longer exactly trivial.
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it's not just the price of books. reading is hard work. tv is easier. we are working hard to break hans' preference for tv over reading.
laziness is a social disease.
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Illiteracy breeds illiteracy.
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besides, his parents are far too litereate to let him miss out on reading.