Reading is perhaps the most powerful educational skill and it must be ‘taught’, learnt, assessed, and ‘remedied’ as an independent subject on the same pedestal as language and math. Here is a list of reasons why reading skills are a very fundamental educational skill:
- Improving concentration: Reading and playing music are the two best ways to improve concentration.
- Improving mental ability: Reading is the best exercise of the brain, far ahead of the most demanding brainstorming sessions. We often underrate the need of exercise for the brain, it needs to be exercised as
much as our body; reading is the best exercise. - Self-renewal for life: Reading is a habit for life! Once acquired, it is yours for life.
- Improving mother-tongue: A mother-tongue also needs high proficiency in reading skills to be able to transact academics in the mother-tongue. Reading literature is the only way to get better in the vocabulary and the many nuances of language.
- Second-language as academic language: Skilled level of reading is the only way to learn a second-language as the academic language.
- Short-term memory management: ‘Efficiency’ is the key issue in working memory management; a maximum of 5-7 distinct elements of thought must be processed within 7-12 seconds for effective thinking and solutions. Poor reading skills leads to poor language skills and that in turn greatly increases the number of elements to be processed within the few seconds window of working memory.
- Best mode to learn anything: Reading is the best of the four modes of acquiring new knowledge. The other three are doing, seeing, and hearing.
- Improving the power of imagination: Interestingly, reading offers the most personal interaction with content because reading is an amazingly imaginative process and leads every reader on a unique journey with the same content.
- Logical thinking: A ‘reading brain’ will be far more logically trained than a ‘non-reading brain’.
- The 2Rs of maths and science: Maths and science acquired through reading as the primary mode is definitely not an inferior choice – one of the greatest physicist of all time, Albert Einstein, and one of the greatest of the 20th century, Richard Feynman, were both theoretical physicists who did not take to experiments for their remarkable contributions (many other greats were also theoretical physicists).
- Reading and the Internet: A good reader is never alone! And the Internet has made it a 24×7 celebration for readers!
