The Hammock Papers: Literacy.

20 June 2025

Literacy.

More than the combined threats of illegal immigration, the Middle East, and beans in chili, childhood literacy is the biggest crisis facing the United States.

Gen Z parents aren’t reading to their kids as often as other generations because they feel like it isn’t fun, raising concerns about the lack of early exposure to books.
Developing the habit of reading for pleasure is linked with serious benefits later on, both in school and in life.
Finally, Doug ponders the obvious: Young people are still motivated to read when it connects to their interests, when they have choice, and when it feels relevant to their lives.

If kids aren't enjoying reading, they've probably been indoctrinated to do it incorrectly. Some ideas from personal experience ...

I've taught for twenty years and I can count on one hand the number kids who were still reluctant to read when given the choice of what to read. Reading comics, graphic novels, websites, etc. is reading that develops momentum; all gateway drugs to the reading life. Choice comes first.
The books that kids are able to choose from on the shelves of their school libraries, "book fairs", and classroom sales from sources like Scholastic, are crap. Trust the classics -- their authors, their culture, their language.
Have plenty of things around to read. Buy books instead of ten-dollar coffees and tattoos.

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL