It has been known for a while that many children are not school-ready when starting their reception year. An alarming proportion cannot hold cutlery, a pen/paintbrush, are not toilet trained and have below-average language skills. I have written about this before , and there are studies about it that are concerning. Interestingly, the parents consider their child school-ready, but this view is not shared by the school – leading me to wonder if schools are increasingly expected to act as parents.
What stayed with me was this headline (click for article here)
One article I read said that some children have clearly never seen a book, never been read to, and never even learned how to turn pages. They try to swipe or tap the page.
Being fed more visual digital content has, in my experience, affected imagination in my students. I see this every day. I have also noticed a steady decline in critical thinking skills with the rise of AI.
I did wonder though (as much as I love reading paper books), will we still need books in ten years? Reading the book I mentioned yesterday, By its Cover by Donna Leon, I realised once again how precious books were in days gone by – the binding, sewing, illustrating and printing of these tomes was a huge task and very few had access to them. Now we can see their entirety with one click, what will the future of actual books be? Do children really need to be able to read books these days?
Happily, Swedes are still generally big readers. The annual major book sales are still ongoing and there were crowds shopping for books. The ages did skew on the higher side though.
What is most worrying to me is the fact that I was taught to read (by an older cousin) from age 3, was walking, feeding myself and drinking unaided by the time I was 14 months old (again being helped by an older cousin). The thing today is families are moving more than they did in the 1950’s and that is resulting in parents being responsible for so much more of the day to day than they were in the past, while it has become necessary for them both to go out and work in order to support the family.