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4. The habit of book reading should be encouraged on a warfront from childhood upward. It should not matter what book the child reads. Reading, comprehension, the art of communicating with others what has been assimilated by reading, and, in due time, writing -- should form part of the compulsory curriculum all the way up even after the student has started narrowing down and specializing. Right now book reading is left, if at all, as an optional and voluntary activity. It would be necessary to institute special awards for theis activity ( I am talking of India at this point) and bring it into the mainstream of the student's career in school. It may be said that the modern means of passing information and literature through the facilities provided by Information Technology like the Internet, have compensated the need to go to books and that the Internet has taken over the need for readers to go to books. But the compensation is not adequate enough. Kids use the Internet only to cull out information for their favourite projects either given by their curriculum needs or motivated by their own pet fantasies. They do not stay with the Internet long enough to gulp whole books of substance. Unless kids learn to sit with books and think leisurely on what they have read the thinking habit will get muzzled up. The very Internet that has done all this should now be used to make the student go back to books. Books can be reviewed, summarised, focussed, and recommended by the teachers of the particular locale or school or colloege. Each educational institution can discover its own means to draw attention to the books that they want their students to read, provide competition for such reading on the Internet itself by announcing awards and incentives. Several innovative measures must be found out as suits the context and the neighbourhood. Several commercial booksellers and publishers are doing a wonderful job now on the Internet to draw the attention of those who surf on the net. But non-profit organizations like educational institutions, teachers, professors, thinkers, parent-teacher-associations, social workers and professionals should make it a mission to tell the next generation what to read, how to read and why. If we do not do all this, the twenty-first century citizen in his thirties and forties would not know what to do with a book! And in a century after that, whatever that remains of 'man' will have to start reinventing reading and writing(!) which is probably one of the few things left yet, that distinguishes man from animal. |