Importance of Reading

            In the previous two sections I have discussed the fact that some of our technology has a way of increasing our distractedness and decreasing our ability to attend to or focus on a task for an extended period of time. In addition, technology has the potential to become an idol for us. One of the reasons that these issues concern me as a Christian, is that God has chosen to reveal Himself to us through His Word. That is, He has communicated with the human race through written words. If we do not know how to read, the communication from God is hindered. But most of us know how to read. The problem many have is the inability to focus for an extended amount of time in order to think about and analyze what God has said. In addition to not being able to focus, we have the problem of not being able to think deeply about the text.

            In Joshua 1:8, God says, “This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night.” He goes on to explain that meditating on it brings success in our lives. This is not the kind of success to which most Americans aspire, but it is the kind of success Christians should work toward. It is the successful life of faith that builds a strong relationship with God and with other people. This success is founded on the wisdom of God that is gained as we think about and reflect on what God has said.

            But in contradiction to this, we have developed a culture that is focused more on the visual media such as TV, movies, and Internet browsing.

Here’s an example of the time spent per day by percentages of young people on various media:

watch television: 84 percent 3:04 hours

use a computer 54 percent 48 minutes

read a magazine 47 percent 14 minutes

read a book 46 percent 23 minutes

play video games 41 percent 32 minutes at console; 17 minutes with handheld

watch videos/dvd 39 percent 32 minutes

watch prerecorded TV 21 percent 14 minutes

go to a movie; 13 percent.

(Dumbest, page 89)

            There are many hindrances to extended thinking and meditating on God’s Word. One of the more recent hindrances is the growing inability to focus on anything for an extended length of time. We are becoming more accustomed to reading web pages where there are multiple windows open begging us to look at them to see what is being advertised or what new event has been posted to Facebook. Throughout most of the texts we read online there are hyperlinks that tempt us to click in order to follow some rabbit trail of thought. While this helps us to extend our knowledge in some way, it also interrupts the flow of thought. Even if we don’t click on the link, we are interrupted by the split-second thought of the possibility of clicking on it. As I mentioned previously, these constant interruptions of our train of thought change the way we think so that it becomes more and more difficult to focus for an extended period of time. Just ask someone under the age of 35 how it would feel to sit down for 30 or 40 minutes to read their Bible and think about it, with no background music, no TV, no cell phone beeps, and no interruptions of any kind. Just the thought of it brings pain and panic. Or how about asking them to listen to even an interesting lecture for 45 minutes? More pain and more panic.

            Nicholas Carr, in his book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, explains that research shows that the average person spends between 19 and 27 seconds at the most on any web page he visits.  How can a person who is used to this kind of scanning, sit down and hear from God through His Word? You simply can’t take in a page of Scripture in 19 seconds! Rather than doing a lot of reading ourselves and encouraging our children to read, we spend time in front of the TV or with our computers and teach our children to do the same!

            Consider the important impact reading time has on student performance in school:

“Buried in the depths of the Kaiser report Generation M is a startling finding about different media use and student achievement. It shows that leisure reading of any kind correlates more closely with a student’s grades than any other media. While eight to 18 year olds with high and low grades differed by only one minute in TV time, they differed in reading time by 17 minutes, (46-29) a huge discrepancy in relative terms ( a 36 percent drop in leisure reading for kids with low grades.” (Dumbest, page 90) What this is saying is that students with low grades spend considerably less time reading than students with good grades.

            We’ve become addicted to our screens: “The screen…promotes multitasking and discourages single-tasking, hampering the deliberate focus on a single text, a discrete problem. ‘Screen mindedness’ prizes using search engines and clicking 20 websites not the plodding, 10-hour passage through a 300 page novel. It searches for information, fast, too impatient for the long-term acquisition of facts and stories and principles.” (Dumbest, page 115)

            This kind of multitasking and rapid skimming is detrimental to grasping the facts, stories and principles found in any text, but most important for us, God’s Word.

            If you are a Christian, you need to take this information seriously. As a parent, you need to make sure that your young person is not losing his ability to concentrate. You have a responsibility to set the example and then establish the expectation that in your home there will be technology-free times when time is devoted to quiet reading and meditation. Just writing the previous sentence sounded strange. When does anyone have time where there is no input from TV, radio, or the Internet? Some people will suggest that reading is a thing of the past and is no longer necessary in our time when our technology serves as the conduit for our information. The problem is, and you need to think about this carefully – the problem is that the God of the universe has chosen to speak to us in written words. Those who cannot read those words either because of illiteracy or inability to focus, will not hear from God!

            But, you may say, is it necessary to read? What about listening to God’s Word? Doesn’t that count? The answer is yes, but how often does anyone sit and listen to the Word of God being read to them? How easy is it in our video-centric culture to sit and listen to words being read for an extended period of time with no other interruptions or input. I think you can see that listening happens less than reading does and is at least equally difficult.

            One of the things educators and researches are noticing is that we are becoming good at skimming, but we are losing our ability to interpret what we read accurately, as well as the ability to think carefully and deeply about what we read. The reason this is important is that when God communicates through words, He is communicating truth and concepts that are not necessarily understood with a quick skim. Many of the sentences in the Bible are long and complex, and many modern readers are unable to understand such complexity, whether it is in the Bible or a book about the Bible. Think about how important this is. God desires to speak to us through His Word, and we may be unable to understand what He is saying because we have become surface readers and have not trained our minds to think deeply and logically about what He is saying. That’s something that should not be dismissed lightly.

            So let me encourage those of you who desire to be faithful to God, to train yourself to put aside the technology and focus on the Word of God for extended amounts of time. Let me encourage you to insist that the children for whom you are responsible do the same. They will grumble and complain, but it is essential for them to learn how to hear from God.

            Read to children early in their life, and then encourage them to read for themselves throughout their growing up years. Have regular conversations with your children. You’ll be keeping the relationship strong, and at the same time you will be giving them the vocabulary they need to navigate through life.

            Mark Bauerlein writes, “Everything depends on the oral and written language the infant-toddler-child-teen hears and reads throughout the day, for the amount of vocabulary learned inside the fifth-grade classroom alone doesn’t come close to the amount needed to understand fifth-grade textbooks. They need a social life and a home life that deliver requisite words to them, put them into practice, and coax kids to speak them.” (Dumbest, page 138)

            This is especially true in the Christian home where you want your children to pick up the vocabulary that they need to describe God’s relationship to man and our relationship to Him. In a recent study of adolescents and twenty-somethings, it was observed that young people simply do not have the vocabulary to describe their thoughts and feelings about God and the truths the Bible teaches about God.

            Another thing that the all-encompassing presence of technology does is allows us to pursue topics that are of interest to us and to avoid topics that we don’t think are all that interesting. We can have it our way.  Now when it comes to educating our children and ourselves, it’s important to expose ourselves to things we may not necessarily be interested in. When someone proposes a class in some unfamiliar area of Christian doctrine, there is a tendency to avoid that class or to allow your children to avoid such a study.

            Bauerlein writes, “For education to happen, people must encounter worthwhile things outside their sphere of interest and brainpower. Knowledge grows, skills improve, tastes refine, and conscience ripens only if the experiences bear a degree of unfamiliarity.” (Dumbest, page 145)

            From this I take it that we shouldn’t try to get off easy when it comes to what kind of learning we subject ourselves or our children to. If we continually read things that we are already interested in, we won’t learn much. With our technology, the tendency is to read about and follow trains of thought that are of interest to us. Because there is so much information available, we do not need to explore the unknown or difficult. One would think that having the proliferation of technology would allow people to learn more and grow more. But the natural tendency is the reverse. It is not natural to delve into something difficult or that we think we wouldn’t understand. But if we don’t, our minds won’t be strengthened.

            As technology moves along, there is a tendency to substitute web reading for book reading. As an older person who was raised on books, I find that I read the web much the same way I read a book. This is not the case with younger readers. And if I spend more and more time reading online rather than in a linear text such as a book, my brain will be affected and changed as well. Book reading affects regions of the brain for language, memory, and visual processing whereas web reading affects the brain areas for decision making and problem solving. (Dumbest, page 120) Why the difference? Because when reading the web there are hyperlinks and ads and other messages along the periphery of the text that causes your brain to constantly be making decisions as to the relative importance of these links.

            Deep reading is hindered by problem solving. Intelligence requires taking things into short term memory and then weaving it into conceptual schemas in long term memory. If our problem-solving areas of the brain are active, the concentration and focus aren’t there to transfer information into long term memory. Our problem-solving capacity has been using up brain power to decide which links to click on or avoid. This can overload working memory which results in distractedness, “understanding” weakened by overloading

            Why am I emphasizing all of this detail? Because I think we as Christians should have an idea of what’s at stake. As we read the Bible and religious texts about the Bible and Christian devotional life, God wants us to meditate and reflect deeply on the truths they contain. In order for that to happen, we need to understand what we read and then take that information deeply into our lives where all sorts of interconnections can be made so that it affects our life. It’s important to understand that out-of-control technology and its resulting distractedness can rewire our brain in such a way that understanding and assimilating the truths of Scripture can be severely impaired. We certainly shouldn’t want that to happen to ourselves, and we especially need to be careful to prevent that from happening to those who are most susceptible to this danger, our children.

             So what are some concrete steps you can take to help prevent this from happening to you and your children?

1. Limit exposure to visual media – whether it be TV, videos or web-based media. I remember way back when our kids were small, my wife was concerned about Sesame Street. Everyone was proclaiming the virtues of such educational material, but she wasn’t so sure. In retrospect, after having observed middle school and high school students up close in an educational setting for over 40 years, I believe she was right. The images on programs such as Sesame Street change every couple of minutes either causing or adding to children’s inability to focus for long stretches of time.
2. Encourage creative, imaginative play. Reduce the number of choices children have to play with at any given time. When your children are faced with which one of 20 different toys they should play with at any given moment, it increases the decision-making part of the brain, but reduces the thoughtful part.
3. Read to your children often and encourage them to read when they are old enough. Let them see you reading, thus setting a good example that they will want to follow.
4. When using technology personally or with children, use it for specific purposes and reduce the impulsiveness of it. In other words, don’t jump to the technology to fill every 5-minute void in something to do. Don’t give your children the example of interrupting one activity with another as demanded by your technology. In other words, when you are writing in a word processing program, as I am right now, don’t keep switching to see all of the world-shaping events in the news and weather and Facebook changes that have taken place in the last 5 minutes. Let it be obvious that you stay on a task for extended periods of time and teach them to do the same.
5. Don’t allow children to have the technology in their rooms. Let everything be out in the open so that you can see and control how its used.
6. As strange as it sounds, create times of quiet in the house where kids can read and work on homework while parents read a book or magazine. Leave the TV off. Make sure cell phones are unavailable for texting or web browsing after a certain time.
7. Teach your children explicitly how to use technology as I’ve outlined it here. If they need to do word processing, provide a computer that has no Internet connection or games so that they only use the tool for one thing. They must be overtly taught the skill of focus rather than distraction.