A Family of Book Dragons in A Rapidly Expanding Book-less Age
A reflection on raising children in an increasingly illiterate culture.
Over at Scriptorium Philosophia, a professor has a reflection on The Average College Student Today. He looks at reading (they won’t), writing (they don’t), and arithmetic (they can’t):
My husband and I are both academics. We see all of this on a daily basis, and it is a conversation we have regularly with our children. We’ve come to realize that, so long as we keep making sure our kids read daily and challenge them with good books, they will do just fine in college. For example, one of our kids is flourishing as a high school student in college classes. Why? If the syllabus says read the textbook, she reads the textbook. There’s nothing magical about it. She does the assigned reading for the week, and then passes the weekly quiz.
We have books. We like books. We read books. The running joke in our family is “books aren’t part of the budget,” which translates to: if we are in a bookstore, we each get to buy a book.
So the question becomes, how do we continue to not only preserve but also cultivate the book culture of our family?
My first instinct is to say that we need to intentionally be part of a community that values books. But, even with our kids in a classical-type educational program, I’m realizing just how counter-cultural our love of reading is. My husband and I have both come to highly value the uniqueness of impromptu book groups, whether it is a group of faculty meeting once a week in someone’s backyard around a campfire to discuss a chapter or two of a recent book on contemporary culture, or a less formal book study that is primarily administered through a text-based group chat. We love these, but they are so rare.
With our kids, we become our own little family book club, and we have several practices that we have used and continue to use.
Since they were little, we’ve had a “rule of life”: everyone must have quiet time for at least an hour every afternoon (not necessarily napping, but quiet time), and everyone must read for at least ________ minutes everyday (when they were under age 8, the rule was fifteen minutes; over age 8, thirty minutes; in the summer, at least an hour every day).
One of the practical things that helped in instilling a love of books was we firmly turned down an offer for a portable entertainment system in our mini-van (basically tablets that could be hooked to the seatbacks). The gift was well-intentioned (what will the kids do on the long car rides back and forth to the main city over an hour away?), but by saying “no,” we gave our kids the opportunity to learn to read in the car without getting sick (a valuable skill), and more importantly, the space to just be alone with their thoughts looking out the window.
We also read books aloud as a family. My husband tends to read fantasy books with the kids: Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings Triology, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and multiple Terry Pratchett books (He also does all the voices; his Nac Mac Feegle voices are fantastic!). I tend to read classics with them: Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, To Kill a Mockingbird, Where the Red Fern Grows, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Together as a family we do table reads of Shakespearean plays including “Much Ado About Nothing” and “MacBeth.”
Every year I create a Summer Reading Challenge for each of the kids, which has a mix of books they love, books they’ve never read, and at least one book that will stretch them. For the most part, the books on the reading challenge have been fiction, but, as my oldest child moved into high school, I started adding non-fiction as well. Each year, there is a reward for completing the challenge: we’ll go to East Side Marios for supper (fine dining in this house!), or Chuck E. Cheese for an afternoon, or now that we’re down in South Carolina, we’ll go to C&C’s for ice cream and arcade games.
Even as we are boxing up our over 2,000 books for our move this summer (pray for our friends who have offered to load and unload the U-Haul!), we’re setting aside a box of books for the long drive back to Saskatchewan. It will be a “summer reading challenge on the go” kind of year. We’ll have a variety of books for the kids and for the parents. We’ll have new books, old favourites, fluffy mindless books, and hilarious read alouds.
Sometimes my kids are treated as curious oddities for carrying books instead of smartphones. Sometimes our conversations when we go to a sit-down restaurant draw comments from those at neighbouring tables. Sometimes our family time is sitting in each other’s presence in the living room while also being individually engrossed in our selected books. And sometimes, well maybe much more than sometimes, our family philosophy can be summed up by this sticker:
In short, we are a family of book dragons in an increasingly book-less age.