A Reader on Reading by Alberto Manguel

Author:Alberto Manguel [Manguel, Alberto]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 978-0-300-16304-9
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2010-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

It is this third learning that is the most difficult, the most dangerous, and the most powerful — and the one Pinocchio will never reach. Pressures of all sorts—the temptations with which society lures him away from himself, the mockery and jealousy of his fellow students, the aloof guidance of his moral preceptors — create for Pinocchio a series of almost insurmountable obstacles to becoming a reader.

Reading is an activity that has always been viewed with qualified enthusiasm by those in government. It is not by chance that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, laws were passed against teaching slaves to read, even the Bible, since (it was correctly argued) whoever could read the Bible could also read an abolitionist tract. The efforts and stratagems devised by slaves to learn to read are proof enough of the relationship between civil freedom and the power of the reader, and of the fear elicited by that freedom and that power in rulers of all kinds.

But in a so-called democratic society, before the possibility of learning to read can be considered, the laws of that society are obliged to satisfy a number of basic needs: food, housing, health care. In a stirring essay on society and learning, Collodi has this to say about the republican efforts to implement a system of obligatory schooling in Italy: “As I see it, until now we have thought more about the heads than the stomachs of the classes that are needy and suffering. Now let us think a little more about the stomachs.” Pinocchio, no stranger to hunger, is clearly aware of this primary requirement. Imagining what he might do if he had a hundred thousand coins and were to become a wealthy gentleman, he wishes for himself a beautiful palace with a library “chock-full of candied fruit, pies, panettoni, almond cakes, and rolled wafers filled with whipped cream.” Books, as Pinocchio well knows, won’t feed a hungry stomach. When Pinocchio’s naughty companions hurl their books at him with such bad aim that they fall in the sea, a school of fish hurries to the surface to nibble at the soggy pages, but soon spits them out, thinking, “That’s not for us; we’re used to feeding on much better fare.” In a society in which the citizens’ basic needs are not fulfilled, books are poor nourishment; wrongly used, they can be deadly. When one of the boys hurls a thick-bound Manual of Arithmetic at Pinocchio, instead of hitting the puppet the book strikes another of the boys on the head, killing him. Unused, unread, the book is a deadly weapon.

Even as it sets up a system to satisfy these basic requirements and establish a compulsory education system, society offers Pinocchio distractions from that system, temptations of entertainment without thought and without effort. First in the shape of the Fox and the Cat, who tell Pinocchio that school has left them blind and lame, then in the creation of Funland, which Pinocchio’s friend Lampwick describes in these alluring words: “There are no schools there; there are no teachers there; there are no books there….

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.