To the Editor:
Re “We’re Just Not as Good at Thinking Anymore,” by David Brooks (column, April 11):
As a former teacher, professor and principal, I agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Brooks’s warning about the dangers of incuriosity and the astoundingly low reading levels of many Americans.
He said what thousands of American teachers have been warning for years. Without advanced reading skills and a dedication to educational development, higher-level thinking cannot exist. Learning must be volitional and encouraged. Because of the bombardment of nonsensical information, a lack of supervision and direction from many homes and the presence of cellphones everywhere, teaching can become a game of Whac-a-Mole instead of a presentation and an exchange of ideas and knowledge.
Information is everything to a society. Having that knowledge cannot be achieved without understanding that reading is essential.
Any society that is not dedicated to learning, not dedicated to reading, to further thought and, most important, not aware of its ignorance, is doomed to fail.
Susan McCarthy-Miller
Raleigh, N.C.
To the Editor:
David Brooks writes that kids these days do not read books for fun, and I generally agree. But what he does not mention — what so many educators around the country would tell him — is that our students desperately want to read for fun. I am a high school teacher, and my students tell me this every day, over and over and over again.
My students want to fall in love with learning. They want to think critically, to analyze story lines, to turn off TikTok for a while and crack open a book. There’s just one thing stopping them: grades.