Episode 145: Reading & Electronics

This episode of A Delectable Education podcast addresses a question Charlotte Mason never had to face: reading and electronics.  Reading in our day is in a state of plummeting deterioration. Electronics are here to stay but have a detrimental effect on the reading habits. How do we cope with these two conditions? How do we help our children live with technology and become deep readers?

Listen Now:

“Education should be by Things and by Books.” (3/231)

“Supply them with books of calibre to give the intellect something to grapple with.” (5/257)

Thus, a boy’s head may be so full of his stamp collection or of the next cricket match that there is no room in it for bigger things. The stamps and the cricket are all right, but it is not all right by any means to miss the opportunities of great interests that come to us and pass unnoticed, while we think only of these small matters. Not only so: boys and girls may be so full of marks and places, prizes and scholarships, that they never see that their studies are meant to unlock the door for them into this or that region of intellectual joy and interest. School and college over, their books are shut for ever. When they become men and women, they still live among narrow interests, with hardly an outlook upon the wide world, past or present. This is to be the slaves of knowledge and not its joyful masters. Let it be said of us as it was of the late Bishop of London, ‘His was the rare gift of mastering knowledge as his splendid servant, not being himself mastered by it as its weary slave.'” (4/I/44)

The Shallows, Nicholas Carr

Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv

The Tech-Wise Family, Andy Crouch

(Contains Affiliate Links)

NEA Studies: Reading at Risk & To Read or Not To Read

“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr

Philip Yancey’s article for the Washington Post

Story Warren Blog

New Article in the NY Times on Digital Influences

 

4 thoughts on “Episode 145: Reading & Electronics

  1. Jen Gorbet

    Excellent episode and very timely!! Thank you so much. This has been a continual battle in our house and even though my son is 13 he still doesn’t have his own phone (though there is no shortage of devices). I debated getting him a phone for his birthday, but decided against it. Always a struggle to find balance. It makes me think about this recent article in the New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/style/digital-divide-screens-schools.html
    Essentially, the trend is that higher income communities (or what is being considered the intellectual elite) are actually working on limiting or eliminating screen time for their children in school and elsewhere, while middle and lower income communities are seeing a proliferation of screens in all facets of their lives. So glad people are talking about this…lots to think about. Thanks again!

    1. Liz Cottrill

      Thank you for the encouragement. Let us all keep on fighting the good
      fight. It is, after all, the minds of our children and the fate of the
      world quite literally at stake. Thanks also for the link to the
      article–can’t wait to read it.

  2. Betsy

    Tech-Wise Family is fantastic! I haven’t had a chance to listen to this episode (was checking in to leave a comment on a different episode 😉 ). We also studied The Shallows by Carr in my library science program. Fascinating….

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