“We read to learn. We read to
live another way. We read to quench some blind and shocking fire. We read to
weigh the worth of what we have done or dare to do. We read to share our awful
secrets with someone we know will not refuse us. We read our way into the
presence of great wisdom, vast and safe suffering, or into the untidy corners
of another kind of life we fear to lead” – remarked Frank Jennings.
Reading is a creature of
society. People invented writing when they first felt the need to communicate
ideas in a more permanent form than in speech. Thereupon, they simultaneously
created the need for interpreting written symbols through a process which came
to be called reading.
Other modes of communication
have come and gone through the ages, but reading as a process of interpreting
graphic symbols has endured because of its convenience and practicability.
Why do the world’s leaders
attach so much importance to the training of reading? Because they know that
“Leading Nations are the reading nations.”
Thomas Jeffersen wrote in one
of his letters, “ people who read can be free because reading banishes
ignorance and superstition.” “Who leads mankind,” asked Voltaire. “Those who
know how to read and write.” The printed word has the power to revolutionize
our ways of thinking and living.
Reading as an aid to Learning
As an aid to learning,
reading possesses unique characteristics. Of special significance is the fact
that it utilizes printed or written words as symbols of meaning.
Purposes for which People Read
People read for different
purposes at different moments. Hathaway (6) identified 1620 purposes of
reading, which were classified under nine major headings; namely:
1.
To gain meanings 2. To gain information
3. To guide activity
4. For social motives (that is, to influence or entertain others)
5. To find values
6. To organize
7. To solve problems
8. To remember
9. To enjoy
Books Have Soothing Effect
Reading makes the young
readers learn to understand reasons for making moral and ethical choices. Lloyd
Alexander has said:
We have machines to think for
us; we have no machines to suffer for us, or to rejoice for us. Technology has
not made us magicians, only sorcerer’s apprentices. We can push a button and
light a dozen cities. We can also push a button and make a dozen cities
vanish.there is, unfortunately no button we can push to relieve us of moral
choice or give us the wisdom to understand morality as well as the choices.
Identification with others
In real life people are too
opaque, too difficult to know and understand. They live behind their masks and
mislead themselves and others as to their real natures. In print, the caracters
can be more real, more intense and revealed, for “we have made them our own,
since it is in ourselves that they are heppening. “we identify ourselves with
the hero ; hearing, seeing and feeling with him in all his action.
The conscious enjoyment and
suffering that the reader feels through identification are even more strongly
experienced in the unconscious, according to psychoanalytic theories of
literature. As the reader projects his impulses and introjects those of the
model, he achieves catharsis, which opens the way for development of new
insights, feelings , and behaviours.
Source: “How to Read Effectively & Efficiently”
by G.C. Ahuja & Pramila Ahuja
image source : www.republika.co.id
image source : www.republika.co.id
