I feel another great thing that happens with children’s books is you actually get information. And little kids, tiny kids want information. They don’t just want to know about a fire truck, they want to know about all the different kinds of fire trucks and what their names are. And so teaches you, it teaches you that language is really the clothing for ideas and for specifics. It’s not just a way, a word we throw out.
It’s the, it’s the right word that, that enables you to communicate exactly what you mean. So I think somewhere along the line, we as a society got the idea that reading was hard, and that reading was unpleasant and that reading was a task and that we had to teach children to read because it was important to read. But if we can somehow rethink that, I think that children are eager to read.
And how it became, maybe it’s because of our evaluation system of how we measure reading skills but if we can kind of rethink that and understand that the pleasure of hearing a story or laughing along with a story or having a human body next to you when you’re reading or of getting information, which children are so curious about. We say oh children are always ask why, well there’s the answer right there in a book. So there’s no reason for it to be something that’s to be avoided or, or regarded as a chore.
In order to enjoy reading, you have to get fluent at it first. So that, that and for some kids, I write about dyslexic kids, so for some kids that’s tricky. But the ability to gather and absorb information and to enjoy the information and to reprocess it in your own life, I think that’s common to all people. So you, even if you’re not a great physical reader, if there are things in your chemistry or in your brain that inhibit you from reading fluently then you can take in that same information other ways.
The point is not to limit your ideas or your creativity or your ability to process information by how you take it in. And not to have it be stigmatized. Because every, every human being is fascinated by something we just have to, the trick of education is to find out what that is and let them go for it.
