Parents are being urged to avoid library summer reading programs.
But so long as youngsters aren’t really being told what to read, what is wrong with providing tangible rewards for reading?
If conservatives insist that the young need to be verbally berated and mistreated by athletic coaches in order to learn what the “real world” is like, what is so wrong in teaching that there are material benefits to be acquired through the exercise of mental faculties?
Those opposing prizes in connection to reading probably rank among the same snobs that, despite their own considerable bank accounts, will berate you if you let it be known that the main reason you go to work is for the paycheck.
There is nothing wrong with slipping in the notion that reading is in large part a means to an end.
That is, in large part, being the acquisition of knowledge to advance one’s stockpile of assets or to at least to come to the realization that there are those bent on doing you assorted forms of harm.
If reading is to be valued solely for the sake of reading and not what else the aptitude can get you, does this mean that the scrawny nerd will be given as much time on the field in the quarterback position as the individual of a more robust physicality and hand/eye coordination?
Ironic that this article was initially posted by the Foundation for Economic Education.
So apparently cutthroat competition is to be celebrated in all other aspects of life.
But when it comes time that the bookish children might have an advantage over athletic brutes and the popular, we are suddenly obligated to embrace the sickening pablum insisting no one should be allowed to exercise existential capital in a manner deemed superior to that of anyone else.
Frederick Meekins is an independent theologian and social critic. Frederick holds a BS in Political Science/History, a MA in Apologetics/Christian Philosophy from Trinity Theological Seminary, and a PhD. in Christian Apologetics from Newburgh Theological Seminary.
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