Eugene David ...The One-Minute Pundit |
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Tuesday, September 30, 2003
I think Philip Pullman is right to say we're testing the joy out of literature for kids. In academe reading becomes something mechanical, something you have to do for grades, something enervating. Slogging through the passive phrases and muddy thoughts of textbooks, glazing the eyeballs over "classics" whose relation to life grows more tenuous by the day, that don't have even one memorable scene or witty phrase, and people end up reading only when they have to. Hence the increasing irrelevance of newspapers, which already demand to be read as an obligation, not for the fun of it.
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