"Mentally" Conditioned Not to READ-Day 76

Happy Monday. I hope you have an absolutely wonderful work week.

I had a very nice weekend. Of course my daughter and I went to the bookstore. We always enjoy the ambiance. We spent this past Saturday reading and analyzing. I also took some children that I tutor to the bookstore. These children enjoyed the "learning" and "education" environment almost as much as I did, or maybe more. They went "exploring" through the children's section. We had "reading" time. We discussed each book that we read, for comprehension. We had a wonderful time and most importantly, they...let me correct this "we" were learning.

But as the weekend came to a close, I asked myself the question, why don't more Black children enjoy reading? I truly have a serious problem with this but I believe I understand the root cause.

Condition-a particular mode of being of a person or thing; existing state; situation with respect to circumstances.

Many Black children "believe" that they do not like to read. This is what is said in most of their environments.

Environment-the aggregate of surrounding things, conditions, or influences; surroundings; milieu.

Most Black children's environment is a negative ambiance. Meaning that most of their time is spent in wasteful activities such as, playing negatives games on the computer, watching "rich rappers" videos on UTUBE, and other nonproductive activities.

It takes time to read. Every word on the page must be viewed and pronounced either aloud or in your head. You must think when you read. Meaning, you must be an active participant as opposed to inactive observer.

Participate-to take or have a part or share, as with others; partake; share (usually fol. by in)

Think about this for a moment: How much thinking does it take to "play" most "games" on the computer? What skills do the children acquire from most of these games? Will these "games" assist the children in the skills needed for their education?

Now let us compare reading.

Read-to look at carefully so as to understand the meaning of (something written, printed, etc.): to read a book;to utter aloud or render in speech.

What skills are required from reading, you may ask?

According to the North Central Education Laboratory, "Cognitive skills are any mental skills that are used in the process of acquiring knowledge; these skills include reasoning, perception, and intuition. Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (1998) describes the importance of cognitive skills in acquiring literacy skills:

"Reading and writing rely on a specific set of cognitive skills such as attention, memory, symbolic thinking, and self-regulation. As children learn to read and write, they continue to improve these skills, making them more purposeful and deliberate. Deliberate attention is required to differentiate between letters, even if they look alike, and to isolate specific portions of a word for encoding or decoding it. Children must remember the previous words as they decode the subsequent words in a sentence. If they do not make a purposeful attempt to remember, they cannot extract what the sentence means. Writing and reading are the use of symbols and if children cannot think symbolically, they cannot learn to manipulate letters and words. Finally, self-regulation must be in place so that children can monitor their own understanding of the print so they can abandon ineffective reading strategies and move on to more effective ones."

So as can be seen by the facts above, reading is essential to cognitive skills.

Cognitive-of or pertaining to the mental processes of perception, memory, judgment, and reasoning, as contrasted with emotional and volitional processes.

This is one of the reasons why "educated people", for the most part, are more likely to want to reason and discuss problems where uneducated and/or illiterate people process perception by their emotions, and are more likely than not to be more prone to violent outburst.

Please condition your children to know that "readers are leaders".

Have a wonderful work week.

L. for Love