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Human Beings Were NEVER Meant to Read Books
And why prisons use reading scores to predict how many beds they’ll need in the future
Let’s talk about readers and prisoners.
In the United States, the Federal Bureau of Prisons uses fourth-grade reading statistics to predict how many beds they’re likely to need in the future.
I know. I felt that sinking, wind-knocked-out-of-you feeling as well when I first learned that in one of Maryanne Wolf’s books (the author of today’s book).
Think about that:
If your child is below a certain reading threshold by grade four, the prison system predicts that they’ll be hosting them in the foreseeable future.
In one sense, that makes them seem like monsters. The Bureau, I mean.
But hey…
It works. So can you really blame them?
The reading abilities of children can almost literally predict their future, and the dangerous part about all of this is that the development of those abilities is NEVER guaranteed.
Human beings were NEVER meant to read.
Instead, the human brain has to rearrange itself to even be able to understand written symbols, and decode the meaning of all those squiggly lines and dashes.
