hbdee 's review for:

Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf

4.0

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Whew! There is SO MUCH packed into this book, I'm sure I could read it many times and still find more than before with each reading. I have been humbled to learn just a bit of what those who teach reading must know; it's a discipline I'd not given much thought to, before.

Neurologists have discovered that our brains are not genetically wired for reading, that it's a skill each person must develop from scratch. No wonder so many children struggle! It's even more difficult for children who are being raised in families that don't speak English as a first language, or who speak a dialect of English, such as the heavily accented southern accent, because these children have various pronunciations that make it harder to parse the individual sounds in a word. Even "cat" has three distinct sounds, C-A-T, that have to be amalgamated to read even so simple a word:

"Unlike its component parts such as vision and speech, which are genetically organized, reading has no direct genetic program passing it on to future generations. Thus the next four layers involved must learn how to form the necessary pathways anew every time reading is acquired by an individual brain. This is part of what makes reading—and any cultural invention—different from other processes, and why it does not come as naturally to our children as vision or spoken language, which are preprogrammed." This insight gives me a much greater appreciation of my own ability to read.

There are severe detriments to poverty, but one I hadn't considered much was the lack of books in a poor household. So I was brought up short to learn: "...[I]n some environments the average young middle-class child hears 32 million more spoken words than the young underprivileged child by age five."

We MUST remedy this; we cannot permit so many children to go without the needed benefits others have--it stunts the growth of our entire nation. Another deficit is watching TV, where the observer doesn't create their own images or scenes and cannot act as a filmmaker of mind, if you will; thus TV allows for only partial learning and does little or nothing for the development of critical thinking skills. In fact, far too many of our children will through through the cracks and never develop expert reading: "Whatever the reasons, to have close to 40 percent of our children “underachieving” reflects a horrific waste of human potential. It is a great “black hole” of American education—a netherworld of the semiliterate, into which more and more of our children slip."

There's another downside to the tsunami of tech we've experienced in the last 30 years: "Will children inured by ever more realistic images of the world around them have a less practiced imagination?
..."What happens to these children when the electricity goes out, the computer breaks down, or the rocket’s systems malfunction?" What, indeed.

For over a hundred years, scientists have studied what we call dyslexia, only to learn that dyslexia includes so many different kinds that it's too confining to call it a single syndrome. Expert English readers use more of the left brain; those with learning difficulties in reading tend to use more of the right brain. Scientists now think the right-sided brain may be older, and it may have had a greater advantage in preliterate cultures where greater emphasis was needed in areas of creativity, such as building and the arts.

The best parts of this work, for me, are those that reflect upon the myriad wonders of reading:

"While reading, we can leave our own consciousness, and pass over into the consciousness of another person, another age, another culture. “Passing over,” a term used by the theologian John Dunne, describes the process through which reading enables us to try on, identify with, and ultimately enter for a brief time the wholly different perspective of another person’s consciousness.

"Through this exposure we learn both the commonality and the uniqueness of our own thoughts—that we are individuals, but not alone. The moment this happens, we are no longer limited by the confines of our own thinking. Wherever they were set, our original boundaries are challenged, teased, and gradually placed somewhere new. An expanding sense of “other” changes who we are, and, most importantly for children, what we imagine we can be.

I'll end with this quote that really expresses how I feel about reading, for myself:

"In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself. But I felt that I, too, existed much of the time in a different dimension from everyone else I knew. There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books, a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe in which I might be a newcomer but was never really a stranger. My real, true world. My perfect island.—Anna Quindlen

Recommended or those interested in the scientific aspects of of literacy, for those who teach reading, and for those who love reading for its own sake.










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