What Happens When People Don't Read?
When education is stupid and empathy is weakness
I had a relative who absolutely believed that education and reading books was a waste of time.
“Education is stupid,” he’d laugh, thinking he was pretty clever with that one. “Get your head out of the clouds.”
When I was a little kid, my mom worked all day and I’d be home alone after school until she got back. My mom was an intense worrier, overprotective. She was the kind of mom who didn’t like me playing soccer because I’d roll my ankles and she didn’t want me to go off into the woods and tromp around looking for Bigfoot because what if I actually met him.
Yes, I would probably try to hug Bigfoot if it looked like Bigfoot was cool with that. Yes, I would probably die.
“Carrie’s heart’s too big,” he’d say. “It’s a weakness.”
So, I was alone a lot and I read a lot of books. We weren’t wealthy enough for cable TV for a long time, so books were what kept me company.
Those books made me live other adventures and other lives. I’d sink my heart into the hero’s fates, sob when bad things happened to them or God forbid, their dogs.
Who I am is definitely at least partly because of books.
That’s why people think books are dangerous.
They are. But it’s in a good way.
There is a piece by BRIAN LYMAN in the Alabama Reflector that talks about empathy. In it, he writes something that’s been bouncing around my insides for a couple of weeks.
He wrote, “Storytelling is the seed of sympathy. Sympathy leads to concern. And concern leads to questions about why people suffer.”
He was writing about novels.
This is not a new concept, for longer than I’ve been a novelist librarians and social scientists have said that books build empathy.
What does it mean, then, to live in a society that doesn’t? In a society where education is stupid and empathy is weakness. It’s to live in a society that doesn’t care if people suffer; it’s to live in a society that doesn’t understand that there are ways of thinking, of seeing, of problem solving that isn’t our own. It’s to live in a society that will only see Papa Smurf and never Dionysius.
It’s been announced that Costco will no longer sell books year round. Since 2022, Barnes and Noble has reduced its middle grade books stock. Books are not as popular as they used to be.
In an opinion piece for the Seattle Times, Pamela Paul writes,
“In the first half of 2024, print sales of middle reader books, intended for children ages 9 to 12, dropped by 5% from the same period the previous year, or 1.8 million fewer units sold, deepening a dip in the market for children’s books that’s held since 2022. Fiction accounted for 71% of the decline. Another worrying study by Scholastic found that reading for pleasure drops steadily as children age, most markedly by age 9, and never recovers.”
I worry that we may never recover, too. Will we learn our empathy, our sympathy from screens and TV and movies and TikTok reels and video games? Some of us will. But some of us might learn something else. We might learn that education is stupid and empathy is weakness. And we won’t just learn it. We’ll live it. Every day.
Knowledge is power. Parents who read will have children who read. My mom used to say to us kids as we were learning to sew, "If you can read, you can sew." Reading is fundamental in all areas of life. I enjoyed my time as a literacy coach and remedial reading tech. Read On!