Einstein apparently said the following. “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
If we read stories for our children in order to raise their IQ, it is very sad. And wrong.
But if we want to open the world to our children, show them the nuances and options, make life magic and interesting, I fully agree.
Stories are of extreme value, all of them. Every narrative element will feed our existence with options, our filters with nuances, our perspective with structure. The more stories we know, the more dreams we can and will pursue, the more energy we have for thinking, the more nuances we understand, the more wholehearted our tolerance, the more precise our values. This is true for the old tales from ancient Greece and the classic cartoons from the 80’es, any story that will keep you interested long enough to read it has something to offer.
It is one of the key problems with schooling, especially compulsive state schooling: There will be a curriculum. Even in a free, local, barefoot hippie school, there will (most likely) be a teacher or leader to pick a curriculum. “Everyone has to read this book.”
I am highly educated, and I am a true bookworm. I have read thousands and thousands of pages of written text, I love the classics and the crime novels, I love the cartoons, the movies, and the audiobooks, I treasure children’s books, and I love mythology. I would say any genre, but I do not really like SciFi, and I am not into scary books. But that’s just me. I know they have high value, and maybe there will be a time.
Even being this reading person, reading and reading for more than 30 years, NOTHING can make me read a book I don’t want to read, a book that does not talk to me, that will not catch my immediate attention and interest.
Why would I ask my children to force themselves through something that does not talk to them instead of letting them read whatever is right for them at the moment?
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