REVIVING THE READING CULTURE Good reading culture and habits have provoked great transformation and inventions that have turned around the fortunes of great countries that we today collectively stereo-type as developed. The United States of America, China and Britain that today stand as reference for what development should be, can be said, to be a product of a societies that have succeeded in entrenching and institutionalizing the culture of good reading habits. The popularly held cliché which is “knowledge is power” can never be by any stretch of the imagination be termed over emphasized, it is more so because all form of developments are a product of knowledge, while on the other hand acquiring knowledge can be achieved mostly through the reading process. With the above postulation it would be save to conclude that adopting a good reading culture can most conveniently transport a third world rated developed country like Nigeria to the destination of becoming a first class developed country. It is usually said that if you want to hide anything away from a black man, put it in a book, of which our general attitude towards reading has buttressed the aforementioned assertion. We have consciously or otherwise ignored the reality that students in our institutions of education can no longer on their own sit and pass exams (WASSEC, NECO, JAMB) without cheating. It is now the trend for both the students and unfortunately their parents, to identify schools that are termed special centers”, for which they are willing to pay more in order to be fraudulently passed. Unfortunately, instead of the students to be encouraged and showed the significance of developing good reading habits in order to pass their exams, they are motivated to disregard the noble dignity of picking up their books by way of investing their minds into it, thereby building their mental capacity to initiate solutions to problems both in the academic field and their everyday challenges (in order to contribute positively to nation-building). With this negative attitude towards reading, we are building a generation of uninformed, misinformed and ill-equipped so called future leaders, which surely would lead to more confusion and purposelessness than what we face this day. I make bold to state that, the solution to the myriad of challenges bedeviling our beloved country and its contemporaries lies in wait in the acquisition of transformational and applicable knowledge through evolving an all encompassing reading culture that envelopes all levels and classes in our society. It is the entrenchment of this culture that would produce the leadership, creativity and innovation that would transform this country in the areas of education, health, infrastructure, just to mention a few. We are in the information age, and ones access to and application of information determines his success in life either as an individual or a nation, this is so because a reader is a leader, and a leader has the capacity to inspire and initiative monumental transformation. That is why more than ever in our history we must collectively mobilize our efforts toward evolving an all encompassing reading culture starting from the family, educational system, government and non-governmental organizations and religious institutions. The efforts should be targeted at indelibly imprinting on our consciousness the need to adopt a good reading culture as an indispensible ingredient for development. To be specific, the average Kurama youths must seek for knowledge especially through cultivating good reading habits, in order to empower themselves for the purpose of both individual and community development.
Posted on: Sun, 19 Jan 2014 18:14:48 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015