Why America's Children Can't Think: Creating Independent Minds for the 21st Century

First impression--this guy loves life and can't wait to squeeze the juice out of every thought in each of the many books that he consumes. This book lacks focus and seems to cover a wide range of subjects all loosely under the umbrella of "reading education." I thought it was ironic that his editor told him to add more on the history of educational reform@mostly in the 20th century, because I would have thought the editor's job would have been to focus--not add more. It's like Kline is a renaissance man who can speak on any subject and relate a reading issue to any other subject in human culture. That said, I got a lot of good ideas from this book. I loved his chapter on the hunt for who authored Shakespeare's works. I even dreamed about who Shakespeare was the night after I read it. But my favorite part was his "phoneme" (different from phonics) system of learning to read. Wow! That gave me clarity on what is truly important in teaching early reading. I wish this book had come with his entire reading program!

I don't completely agree that our kids "can't think," but I do think American culture has come to have an increasingly chaotic fabric and the author raises one very substantial point in that regard: the way we read affects the way we think about the material we are reading. The importance of reading is not just some archaic value, it sets the tone for education in general.The way we engage written material does seem to me to be central to the kinds of questions we ask, and consequently the way we understand the material. When I browse a tree of documents on a website, I often seem to come away with a very different understanding of the content than when I read the same material in a book. Some of this may just be technological (taking margin notes is still difficult without a book, etc.). I suspect that there may be more to it, because the way we tend to use the web medium makes attention-grabbing more important than the organization of the material. We tend to organize web pages to keep our limited attention span engaged rather than to engage deep thinking about the material. What we lose isn't obvious, because we tend to think of learning solely in terms of lists of facts. However deep thinking requires that we more actively engage the material, ask questions, follow up, criticize the arguments, and so on. If you have benefitted as much from reading as I have, you will have no trouble finding the author's view congenial in its stress on reading for understanding and interpretation, and also disturbing in its implications for the way we are changing the way we read. At the very least, this book is itself very engaging and well-written and serves as a good example of why we should be taking the fundamentals and concepts of reading very seriously as new technologies begin to augment and replace it.