The Value of Not Reading

                                                                                                                                               Vol. XXII, No. 2, February 2009

Children are being taught to read at the earliest possible age. Sadly some of them never learn to read – oh, they can pick up an ad and tell you what it says; they can scan a sex magazine and find excitement. But they never learn the basic purpose of reading – not merely to acquire knowledge, but to gain wisdom. We well know that most of our learning has to come through books. And reading can stretch the imagination. But there is so much bad reading material today that maybe we ought to help our children and youth realize that there may be value in not reading. Bad reading not only wastes time; bad reading makes one stupid. There is a terrible ignorance of good books, and a tremendous amount of real ignorance IN most of the books being published.

So much of what we give the children to read these days is either infantile, and often stupid, or it is written from a so-called politically-correct standpoint, using the brainwashing lingo of the social scientist. We give them the worst of all possible worlds. We tie them to gaudy picture books about some TV character, or stories about a grape or a carrot, or whatever with a common name, or stories whose lesson is the opposite of what they ought to learn. There is no prison like a book, and we bind our children into the tightest of meaningless bonds.

But the prison of meaninglessness is not reserved just for our children; it gathers in such a vast portion of our youth and adults. When reading is just for entertainment it is not just a waste of time; it is a narcotic which deadens imagination, and ultimately can dull the conscience. It narrows and darkens one's world so that there are no windows through which to see the high vistas of goodness and righteousness. Purposeless reading is so often a manhole into a cesspool of escapism, or a walk through the sewers of infidelity, libertinism, and moral rottenness.

The only thing worse than that sort of reading is the endless watching of mindless TV. Parents who have genuine concern for the future intelligence and mental abilities of their children should be keenly aware of what their offspring may be watching on TV, or what they are reading. So much that is published today is pure trash, or worse.

[Reprinted from the August 2007 issue of The Watchman, M. O. Owens, Jr., editor. You may request a free subscription by writing: Owens Ministries, Inc., P.O. Box 2066, Gastonia, NC 28053.]