I acquired the seed of an irrevocable determination to get a college degree when I was very young.
I had no immediate knowledge of its implantation. I, my sister, two years my senior, and my brother, two years my junior, clung to my mother”s rocking chair while she read The Adventures of Billy Goat Whiskers to us.
I know I was not yet 5 years old, for a second brother, five years my junior, was not yet born; and at that age, the adventures of that audacious goat were soul-stirring to me. Mother”s reading them to us made me love books and want to learn.
There were other books, but Billy Goat Whiskers was the pivotal publication, the one I remember, the one most responsible.
Later, at around the age of puberty, my discovery of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, whom I studied avidly, though with little understanding, intensified my appreciation of knowledge and culture and strengthened my determination, of which I was now conscious, to get higher education.
I managed to graduate in 1959 from the University of Oregon, at the age of 36, with a BA degree in English literature.
It was not much, but it made my life easier.
My point d”appui here: if a minor act such as reading to your children from matter they enjoy can incline them toward a better way of life, and my experience indicates it can, then any time that is right for the children is the time to begin.
This is because we in North America are blamable to a criminal degree for neglecting our new generations.
No matter how complaint the children, however, if they don”t truly desire to be read to, it will do more harm than good to read to them.
It”s impossible to overpower the weak. Forced compliance is no compliance.
The value derived from reading or listening derives from the mental or emotional energy (what psychologists call the cathexis) one willingly invests in the act of reading or listening.
This investment actualizes and vivifies the experience, makes it more of an experience and less just something thought about.
Dean Sparks
Lucerne
