Wikipedia lists 182 book burnings in history. No doubt there have been more, but why are books so dangerous that you have to violently burn them? The most obvious reason is that ideas have power. The power can be an idea, knowledge or the opposite, disinformation.
Disinformation is meant to deceive, therefore if any of the book burnings are justly defended, then that’s the best case scenerio. More often, those in authority want control, therefore they wish to deprive the people of knowledge or an idea they oppose.
The United States is most likely the number one defender of free speech in history and books fall under that category. The founders of America believed that its worth it to protect all speech, good and bad so the people can decide for themselves. This has allowed ideas and knowledge to flourish, therefore making the United States a beacon to the world. Since its inception, America has been an innovator and prosperous one could easily argue. Years of interpretation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights has come through the Courts making some restrictions. For example, you can’t yell, “Fire!” in a crowded theater or incite violence, riots or threaten people’s lives without consequences.
The restrictions to free speech seem to lean towards audible words, more so than books. Imagine if your next door neighbor yelled at you all night long at the top of their lungs. That has been codified as disrupting the peace and there can be legal action taken against the screamer. Books are more latent in their power and are usually accepted even if they archive offensive expression. So books are more tolerated in a free society unless someone beats another over the head with one; then, it is condemned, not for the thoughts on the pages, but because it was used a a weapon.
Of all the book burnings, the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, Egypt is among the saddest. They had a goal of collecting all the books in the world for the sake of preserving knowledge. Some say that losing all those books set the world back 1000 years.
Books are like matchbooks. They are just objects. But when you use them for their purpose, they can light logs in the fireplace to keep you warm on a winter’s night. Or, they can be used to start fire that can burn countless acres, destroying everything in its path. Books just sitting on a shelf have no power; they are just wood pulp with various binders and a little ink. A book’s latent power is unleashed when you take it off the shelf and actually read it.
It would be prudent to be open-minded, yet selective in what you read. As a parent, you can help empower your kids for a lifetime if you get your kids hooked on books. Help them feed their curiosity with books. For example, if you observe them being fascinated by butterflies, show them books with words and pictures. You might be surprised that they can’t put it down. My parents did just that and I’d take the butterfly field guide outside with me to start identifying and learning everything I could about these little wonders of nature.
The title to this article is not about an immanent scare that the whole internet is about to come down, rather its purpose is to make you think of how important all of that stored knowledge is.
There was a famous library in Alexandria, Egypt where they likely had the largest storehouse of known information in the world and it been burned and ransacked by in its peak. Thus the world lost possibly its most valuable treasure, the knowledge contained in the books of that library. Some have said that the loss set the world back 1000 years. However you quantify the loss, it was a great tragedy. We lost mathematical formulas, science and medical understanding as well as history.
Without books, all you have are the memories of all living people on the planet at the time. So, with every generation that follows, you lose that knowledge because of the challenges of transferring knowledge orally.
The Power of Books
Delving into this topic let’s you appreciate the value and power of books. Books are one thing and reading them releases their power. You can have the largest library in the world, but if no one reads those books, then they are only latent potential.
Throughout history, political leaders have forced book burnings to eradicate the public’s exposure to knowledge and different beliefs. The leaders saw books as one of their greatest opponents to controlling the population.
The United States was founded on the idea that every person has the right to freedom of speech and access to great ideas through books. But remember, if no one reads them, books are just dead trees and ink. So, encourage your children to read at the earliest age as possible and you’ll give them the greatest tool to excel in life. If they find a hobby or passion, empower them with books.
Videos About the Library of Alexandria, Egypt
The burning of the Library of Alexandria in Ancient Egypt by Julius Caesar ranks among the worst crimes committed against humanity in known history. Lost scientific research including physics and anatomy and medicine, as well as knowledge and documentation of culture and history is widely believed to have set human civilization back at least 1,000 years.
For 50 years, I’ve seen books and movies based on books be released to the public. I’ve noticed that those who read the book before they saw the movie, almost always say the book was better. Why is this?
Every day human beings usually submit to a thing we call sleep. During this process, most everyone has noticed, they have dreams. Though the dreams are vivid, we usually are confused at where in the world the visions came from. To many, they seem bizarre.
My guess is that the mind has an extraordinary ability to create, but when awake, we often just go from point A to point B, in a linear fashion. But the mind desires to tap into so much more. A world of infinite possibilities awaits.
When we read a book, some of that dream-like capability sneaks in on us that we often suppress, except when our guard is down when we sleep. While reading, the whole world disappears and we go into a trance-like state where we read a finite passage, but then our imagination takes over and we read between the lines. We form a visual picture of a scene or character and we connect to the story from a very personal perspective.
Later, a movie comes out, based on the book, and we are often disappointed. We envisioned a different place, and the characters seem to be more shallow than we imagined.
They say everyone has a book in them, but few have the confidence or dedication to put our thoughts down into words. However, when we read, we tap into the latent power of the mind and we’re less judgemental. We create a world in our mind nearly without effort.
I’ve had one regret in my adult life…I wish I’d become a more prolific reader. I’ve always been competent and I find myself reading constantly, but I never reached the heights of avid readers that can’t put a book down.
I’d encourage one gift parents and teachers can give their children that will bless them for a lifetime, when kids have a hunger to learn more about something, fill that void with a book. Once the habit of reading is developed for a young person, it will enrich their lives forever.
When I was involved with a home-based business full-time for 10 years, the leaders said over and over again at training sessions, that leaders are readers. In fact, they had a training and motivation system that had a book of the month club. They said from stage over and over again that you’ll be the same person in 5 years except for the books you read and the people you associate with.
In the article at Start Us magazine, they state 5 reasons that leaders are readers:
Reading helps us rise above our current situation and challenges, giving us a new perspective.
Reading connects you to people that have overcome challenges. Authors become your advisors.
Through reading, you can hang out with intelligent people from today and from a thousand years ago.
You can become an expert in any field through reading. Remember Abraham Lincoln read by candlelight from a log cabin which gave him the knowledge to become the president of the United States.
Reading books is a healthy escape from stress.
These 5 points are reworded, however, the pearls of wisdom remain the same.
While listening to a success trainer named Zig Ziglar, he said you could become an expert in any field if you will give 15 minutes a day to reading for 5 years, no matter how difficult your current situation is.
Success motivator, Tony Robbins says, we overestimate what we can do in a decade or two. Here’s a direct quote from his Twitter feed:
“Most people overestimate what they can do in a year and they underestimate what they can do in two or three decades”. #iamnotyourguru
The key to building a skyscraper is the foundation. A tall building is only as good as the initial stages of construction, beginning with solid planning and a solid foundation. When it comes to reading, the best time to start is doing everything you can to give your child a head start is giving them early childhood literacy curriculum beginning as early as 2 to 4 years old during the preschool years.
The preschool reading curriculum developed by Read It Once Again for parents and teachers, emphasizes 3 methods that young minds respond to naturally:
Rhyme
Rhythm
Repetition
Do your child or classroom a big jump start for success in life, the gift of lifelong reading.
By the Time a Child a Child Is 4 Years Old, Parents Start Losing Their Influence to the Child’s Peers
Studies have shown that parents hold the greatest influence in their children’s lives during the first 4 years of life, then their peers take charge of their growing minds. No wonder parents are so frustrated with their kids during their teenage years, because they have already lost their ability to shape their behavior long ago, but don’t realize it.
One thing parents can do is watch out who their kids associate with, because they will influence their behavior. If they hang out with bad kids, you child will likely follow them down a path of bad choices, but if they spend time with positive peers, they’ll likely make better choices.
There is another option to mold your children that can influence their life from the early years all the way through their entire adulthood, and that is if the kids are readers. Motivational gurus are frequently heard saying that leaders are readers. Books can take you into a whole new world that can reframe your thinking. If the writer does this well, then the thoughts they wish to promote can literally change the child’s perspective on many important issues. However, like good or bad influences from their friends, the choice of books they are also critical.
The Power of Books
When a writer composes a book, they can draw you in by being relatable to the masses, then they can methodically build a case to support an idea or new way of thinking. This can be done with through character development and snippets of ideas interwoven throughout the book.
“One’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
If you look at the character development of Tony Soprano, one can fall in love with his character, even if he’s really the bad guy by making him human and relatable. We’ve seen this more and more in screenplays and novels where the reader finds themselves cheering for the anti-hero or even villain by creating sympathy where you can see the world through their eyes.
This is a powerful way to shape culture. One can also see it in the music industry. They have the power to suck you into singing lyrics that you totally disagree with by leveraging a human’s natural enjoyment of rhythm and harmony. In the privacy of one’s car, you can look over at the car next to you at a red light and see a priest singing curse words at the top of his lungs as he’s seduced into gangster rap lyrics.
With all the media choices we have online, I have been drawn to documentaries. I’ve found myself having a belief set in concrete in the first few minutes of the documentary and then by the end, I have completely changed my view. That’s powerful.
For example, I read a title about clean energy created by windmills, and I thought to myself, that’s good…who can argue that we need more energy producing windmill farms?
At the beginning of the documentary they touted the benefits of wind power, but then slowly, they started explaining the reality of how they hurt residents living near the windmill farms.
They’d go into kitchens of people waking up with a strobe light effect as the sun was blocked by the blades of the windmills in a disturbing way. The residents talked about how this constant flashing was driving them crazy. The video of the kitchen table looked like someone was turning the lights on and off. Then, they complained about the constant roaring sound that never ended, even as they tried to go to sleep.
The windmills were showcased as environmentally friendly until you saw the stack of birds the blades killed as they spun. It was a disturbing site to see stacks of dead birds at the feet of the windmills.
So, I went from having strong support for the free energy created by nature to completely skeptical. In one and a half hours, I was flipped from pro-windmill power to thinking that the windmill farms can only be good in very rural places with consistent high winds.
The power of the written word, movies and other cultural influences won over my thinking even though my peers were pro-wind power, other sources put me over the edge.
My recommendation to parents is make sure your kids have access to books and videos if they have passion for something your child has interest in. On their own initiative, you’ll find them pouring through books to fill their hunger on the subjects. Fan the flame to these good influences in your children’s lives and you’ll see the positive results as the child grows into a mature adult.
Reading books can make the transition from being considered reading to play, like a labor of love.
Teachers can give the building blocks of reading by making reading fun for preschoolers using curriculum with rhyme, rhythm and repetition, then help children take those foundational skills and expose them to books that fill their hunger for more knowledge of healthy passions. Reading will fill their natural curiosity and become a lifelong habit.
My high school offered a semester of speed reading to my surprise. I’d heard the Evelyn Wood Speed Reading courses offered on the radio station for expensive prices, so I thought I’d take the course for free in high school.
I wish I’d also taken the typing course they offered, but I put off learning to type until I was in college. I needed rapid reading and typing skills in college as much as anything, because they loaded us up with books to read, then we’d have to do at least two research papers per semester for every class I took.
One the first day of my speed reading class, my teacher set up a clunky little projector that she demonstrated would flash words on the screen and she could change the setting to flash the next group of words according to a setting.
She explained, you don’t want to read every word, its preferable to have your eyes zig-zag from clumps of words that have more meaning. You let your mind go and throw away words like, the, and, but, etc.
To start with, she put it on a super low speed, so that you were actually bored with how long it took to flash the next paragraph on the screen. Impatiently, she was eager to turn the dial to a faster pace and you were supposed to just keep up.
I remember, not being sure if this technique was actually helping or not because before long, I felt like it was going so fast that my eyes were glazing over.
I could grab a group of words and have some recollection of the concept of the article, but I felt insecure that I was really getting it. The machine whirred on, click, click, click…
To this day, years after high school, I’m not sure how much the class helped. It seems to me that sheer practice has helped.
Today, I read and Tweet politics for about 3 hours a day. I work from a home office and design websites. Nearly every break I take, I go outside and sit on the porch and pull up a news feed on my cell phone. If I find the headline or article has value, I Tweet it to a group of around 60,000 followers. Sometimes I just read the headline, then Tweet it. When I’m really interested, I skim the article or read it completely. Knowing that if I get it wrong, I’ll immediately have critics reply, pointing out that I got it wrong.
Having this group of moderators pushes me to have very good comprehension, because you feel silly if you promote something inaccurately.
I’ve published about 50,000 Tweets and it seems to me that I’m able to fly through a ton of articles because I have a keen interest in politics. I haven’t tested myself, but my guess is, going through such a large volume of content, my reading speed must be, at times, double the reading speed I had in high school.
Another reason I think I can fly through the material is because I’ve become familiar with who’s who in politics so I don’t have to slow down to figure out who they are talking about.
My question still remains as to the best way to teach a child to read and then go from sounding out words audibly, then reading silently while still sounding out every word, to letting go and just taking in the words and meaning without being tied to the speed at which you would read aloud.
Recently, I was commissioned to build a web site for a retired public school teacher that had dedicated her retirement to creating preschool curriculum to build a solid reading foundation while at a preschool age. The content is good for children at normal learning levels and exceptional for children with learning disabilities, like autism.
Their website is https://www.ReadItOnceAgain.com. Their curriculum has a common theme throughout, that excellent reading skills can be achieved through rhyme, rhythm and repetition. I think they could add one more r word and say rhyme, rhythm, repetition and reading.
I throw in reading because I think reading a lot growing up leads to the ability your whole adult life to soak in many more ideas for your to stretch and grow as a person.
So far, in my search to learn rapid reading, the best answer I’ve gotten is to spark a child’s interest in something, then let them on their own curiosity let books fill that hunger.
If you have any ideas on how to develop faster reading skills, I’d love for you to share them in the comments below.
“When specialized therapies are related to the theme of the classroom activities, children make progress more quickly. Providing therapies in the classroom allows teachers and therapists to observe each other’s techniques and share teaching strategies. This benefits teachers, therapists, and most importantly your students!”
Begin by presenting an overview of the Read It Once Again curriculum with your therapists.
Speech therapists will focus on activities found in the speech and language section.
Activities for physical and occupational therapists are found in the Motor section of each unit. Gross motor activities are grouped at the beginning; fine motor activities follow gross motor about midway through the section.
Please note that all of the domains in our units over-lap. Once your therapists are familiar with how our units are structured, encourage them to look through each domain for activities that are also appropriate in their areas of language, gross motor or fine motor.
Language goals and objectives are present in most activities in all domains.
When teachers and therapist work closely together, student achievements will soar!
In my first post on this blog, I recounted how I learned to read at a preschool age around 3 to 4 years old. It started with a record player along with a printed guide to match words with what they mean and how they are said.
As my phonetic skills improved, my parents used a combination of reading bedtime stories to asking me to read the books to them and sounding out every word.
This worked wonders as I was able to read out loud and pronounce the words correctly. Along with discussion about the meaning of the story, I learned comprehension. Later, this skill has stayed with me for my adult life allowing me to perform well, even in college.
One limitation occurred in this learning sequence, I found myself sounding out the words when I was doing silent reading in high school. I completely understood what I was reading and tested well on the content, however, I found myself bound to how fast I could read audibly even though I was reading silently. I read silently in my mind as if I was reading aloud.
This gave me a reading speed of around 600 to 700 words per minute in high school. I was awarded for my performance by an invitation to be on the National Honor Society, but it took more time at home to read the material than other kids who became avid readers in elementary school. I recall one of my best friends in grade school, a boy named Bobby, read voraciously all kinds of what I considered big books. I’d go to the library and open the books he’d been reading for fun and I rolled my eyes thinking just how long those books would take me to read. So, the first big book of around 500 pages I read was at age 13. It was a racy novel by Jacqueline Suzanne, named, “Once Is Not Enough”.
I found that the book brought me into an adult world that, as a young teenager, I was hungry to learn about. I was so proud of myself as I held the book up for inspection after I’d conquered it. Wow, I read the whole thing!
No doubt, my childhood friend could have read the book in 4 or 5 hours, while it has taken me two weeks of reading a little every day.
The larger picture I’m suggesting is that the ability to read 1500 wpm or above makes all the difference for you as you become an adult. A wise person once said, you’ll be the same person you are today in 5 years, except for the books you read and the friends you keep. The greatest thoughts in the world have been recorded in the written word, so having the skill to consume them effortlessly is possible one of the greatest skills you can develop in school, K through 12.
Much of what I learned in school, I’ve never used as an adult. Case in point, I took geometry, pre-algebra, algebra 1, 2 & even algebra 3 & trigonometry, but its never made me a dime as an adult. I’m sure it stretched my mind and taught me to be disciplined and focused, but the ability to do abstract math, has served me poorly as an adult.
So, my big question is: how do you go from being able to read words, pronounce them correctly in early childhood to being a fast, voracious reader.
I really don’t know, so I just called my step brother, who though he was a rowdy kid and hung out with the wrong crowd, how he became such a fast reader.
When I was at a university getting my bachelors degree to teach in a public high school, I was doing my internship at a local school and found a 23 page story by science fiction writer named Ray Bradbury that I thought was gripping. It took me about 30 minutes to read and then brought it to the class I was teaching. The students loved it as well because the story held stimulating ideas and was extremely poignant.
I was talking to my step brother, who I thought of as a juvenile delinquent, about how well the class had responded to the story. He said, give me the book, I want to read it. I thought his pride was kicking in and he’d come back to me after a while and feed me a bunch of garbage about how he’d read the story and that he would try to snow me.
I handed him the book and 10 minutes later, he came back and said, yes, its a good story; I can see why the kids like it.
There was no way he could have read that story in 10 minutes and comprehended all the nuances, so I immediately started pelting him with questions, because that story took me 30 minutes to read while I was in college.
He proved me wrong. He loved the story, he understood the plot completely and he actually read it in one third of the time it took me to read it.
This is why I called him this week, some thirty years later, to ask him how he became such a fast reader.
At first, he kinda shrugged it off, but I kept digging because I really wanted to know because he had humbled me.
He started recalling that he spent a lot of time with his deaf grandparents and they encourage him to read. I thought BINGO, that was it! He learned to appreciate words because he had deaf grandparents. That was the secret.
No, he said, that wasn’t it.
Well, what was the secret, I pressed. He said, maybe it was a couple of things. They had a collection of big Disney books in the house and when he watched the Sunday night, “The Wonderful World of Disney,” it sparked his interest, so the rest of the week, he’d dive into the Disney books, until he got to see the show the next week.
He came up with two other reasons that he might have become an exceptional reader. His uncle was often at his house and he was 13 years older and he looked up to him, so he hung on his uncle’s ideas. His uncle was into politics and higher level subjects. To relate to him, he stretched to please him. This experience got him reading some of the news much earlier than most children.
The other thing was that he loved music. He loved how it made him feel and he would spend hours and hours listening to it. He would bang his imaginary drums in the air with his eyes closed envisioning himself on stage before an admiring crowd.
He listened to every word of the lyrics and could spout them off along with the songs for hours. This attracted him to reading everything he could get his hands on to learn about the music, the musicians’ bios and the meaning of their songs. This hunger to learn about music drove him to read and read and read everything he could.
To sum it up, he said his desire to learn about what he was enjoying on the radio is what got him to love reading.
This shatters my paradigm because I was looking for a sequential technique for early childhood reading curriculum that leads to success, but for him, it was his desire to know more.
How do you add that as a skill? Its elusive because who knows what will spark a young mind to want to read everything they can get their hands on about a subject that attracts them?
So, for me, the formula for reading success as a young child is:
Phonics
Someone reading you bedtime stories
Then, getting the child to read the stories out loud so the monitor can guide them
Getting the child to find a subject that makes them want to learn everything they can about the subject through reading.
Step number 4 could be the most important ingredient in the reading recipe. It seems that children are naturally curious, so one just has to expose them to the world of opportunity until they land on something that inspires them.
What are your thoughts on how to get kids to go from being a competent reader, for testing, to loving to read so much that they can’t put a big fat book down until they’ve read it?
When I was 3 or 4 years old, my parents purchased a phonograph to play records. Then, they purchased a record set, probably a lot like “Hooked on Phonics.
The phonics tutorials were fun as I recall, and to connect written words to learn how to pronounce words. It was extremely helpful to see the words as the record played, making it easy to learn all the exceptions to the rules, like silent letters, words influenced by foreign languages. Also, seeing letter combinations that can sound the same, like f and ph, made learning a breeze.
While my mom cooked, she multi-tasked by having me read books with lots of pictures. There was usually a large illustration on the page to attract me emotionally, and then below, there was a simple sentence. My mom could cook dinner and still monitor my verbal reading without missing a beat. To this day I’m so grateful that she made this ritual a common practice. Its probably why my verbal skills IQ test was in the 130s when I test tested in elementary school.
My mom, and occasionally, my dad, would read me books at bedtime. The genius of it was to expose me to a whole new world inside of a book. Great strategy!
Later, they would give me the same book and have me read it to them while I was in bed. If I struggled with a word, they’d help me though it.
In elementary school, I had friends that would read big books as if they were totally addicted to reading. I’d go to the library and thumbed through the books they’d already read, thinking, wow, that’s a lot to read. I’d start at page one and read the first paragraph and sound out the words in my mind. My friends became voracious avid readers, whereas, I just became very competent when I needed to read for school, but since I sounded out the words in my mind, I think my speed suffered. I was held back by the speed in which I’d read audibly, even though I was pronouncing the words in my mind.
In high school, I remember having good grades & was a member of the National Honor society. One weakness remained, I still found myself sounding out the words in my mind as I read books. I think that I missed the leap that avid readers had learned long ago, reading in clumps of words, rather than sounding it out in my mind.
I think I was reading around 600 to 700 words per minute in high school and I rarely read books. I just did the best I could to read enough to get good grades.
When I went to a university after high school, the reading requirements shot up exponentially. I remember taking 21 hours in a compressed summer school semester and one class required me to read over 20 plays in 6 weeks. I couldn’t keep up, so I winged it, relying on reading the teacher and giving them back what I thought they wanted. That worked, but still I never read all those plays and I’m sure I missed out on a lot of enrichment.
The one skill I regret not possessing as an adult is speed reading. Voracious reading is one of the best ways to expand your horizons. I read about 2 or 3 hours a day of news on the internet, which has probably helped me get up to about 1500 words per minute. When I find something that intrigues me, I share it on Twitter. I’ve made about 50,000 Tweets to date. I have to make my Tweets accurate, or followers immediately call me out, so I don’t just fly through the articles, I have to have precise comprehension, because who wants to be called out for creating fake news.
To this day, I don’t know the best way to go from learning how to read and pronounce words when you’re at the preschool age, to getting kids hooked on books. If anyone has a recommendation on how to get kids to go from reading the words slowly in their mind to empowering children to read groups of words with the leap to more of a speed reading style, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Someone with wisdom said, you’ll be the same person in 5 years as you are today except for the books you read and the people you associate with. After that is said, they usually say, “leaders are readers”.
These insightful admonitions remind me of the profound statement that Oliver Wendell Homes gave us:
“A mind, once expanded by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.”
Special Needs Preschool Curriculum 