TO READ OR NOT TO READ, THAT’S THE QUESTION!
In my essay today, I’d like to address a topic I’ve been sleeping on for quite a time. Consider a society where criminal offences increase every day, unethical events reach unstoppable levels, and the upcoming generation believes that the world consists solely of popular trivia, sports and leading a hedonistic life. Surely I won’t put all the blame on the new generation; the real culprit is the previous generation that fails to rear it. My main aim in writing this piece is not to find a culprit but to draw attention to one of the greatest problems in our country.
It is hard for a non-reading society to have ideas of its own. This does not mean that only readers can have ideas. By his nature, man is in a constant process of learning. But as long as the process continues in the same manner, man will just learn what he sees and experiences; what he does not experience, what he does not come across, he will not know. Therefore, reading gets societies to progress. Worldly life is short and having ideas through experience takes up a big part of man’s life. At a time when he is ready to bear fruit, he leaves this world. For this reason, people are encouraged to read so that they can bear fruit earlier. By reading, I don’t mean going to university or completing graduate studies or doing a PhD, all of which come to mean specializing in a certain occupation. What I mean is reading life so that man can live in peace and quiet in society. Reading this life means knowing the pattern by which the events in the world repeat themselves, understanding the fact that many of the firsts in our lives were lived by others at certain times in history, and moving forward by avoiding the mistakes of the ancestors. Man has to read books and form ideas to be able to carry the human flag to greater heights. Otherwise, the same injustices, the same tyrannies and abuses, will continue taking place. I’d like to share some statistical information to elucidate the point.
We are the 12th country in terms of book turnover because test preparation books and textbooks distributed at schools are the primary causes that raise our global ranking. This is evidenced by the libraries in Turkey which have virtually become test preparation centers. When you look at the tables, you can see that people are either studying for class or doing tests. The percentage of regular readers is .1% (one thousandth), while it is 21% in France and England, 14% in Japan, 12% in the USA, and 9% in Spain. We rank 86th in the world in reading. 65% of the readers read romance books, 24% political, 13% opinion, and 7% self-development.
In addition, because children imitate their parents, they imitate the way their parents spend time on social media or using electronic equipment. The way youngsters wear, speak and develop cultural values varies greatly according to the celebrities they follow on social media. Therefore, it has gained special importance for new generations to see good examples first in the family and then judge the external world by this value judgment. According to TUIK data, we spend 6 HOURS watching TV, 3 HOURS surfing the Internet, and only 1 MINUTE reading books. Reading is as much a socioeconomic and cultural phenomenon as it is related to habit formation. And yet we can generate comments for TV series and pictures rather than generate knowledge and science. Parents buy books for their children but they do not read themselves, which reminds of parents who smoke or drink alcohol but say “Don’t you ever” to their children. Such a practice generally produces unexpected results. Children take their parents as role models. If parents are interested in the phone or TV, children cannot be expected to get a book and read it. There are so many series, films and social media applications that it is impossible for the child to deal with them alone, so the parents have to give support.
The number of people who have a habit of reading is about seventy thousand, and there are about 25 million active students in our country of 80 million. This makes the magnitude of the situation clearer drearier. If we cannot get these children, who demand to learn things in the educational process, to read books, the gravity of the problem becomes clear for everybody. Mind you, studies show that even teachers at schools do not have the reading habit. A study conducted by E?itim-Sen (Turkish Educational Union) found that 9.7 of the teachers read one book a year, 6.8% one every six months, 2.4% one every four months, 7.4% one every three months, 8.6% one every two months, 27.6% one every month, 10.3% one every two weeks, and 17% one every week, while 10.2% read none. That’s why our coffeehouses have outnumbered our libraries. Another aspect of the topic is related to faith. People do not read in a country where 99% are said to be Muslim although having knowledge has a special place in our faith. Not only books on humanities but also books on religion and Sufism are avoided. More interestingly, people are not even aware of the existence of such a need. Confucius says, “O Lord, give me a house full of books and a garden full of flowers.” Another study shows that reading ranks 235th in a list of needs made by Turkish people. A better performance could not be expected from a society that claims to know everything, goes even further and says that it knows the best of everything, issues decrees without opening a book, and shapes its life not according to books but according to the politicians or celebrities it sees on TV. Still, it is a promising datum that the need for reading could make the list. I find it necessary to share an important piece of information here: throughout history tyrants and dictators who occupied a country considered it priority to destroy its books and codices because it is easier to rule a non-reading person who does not have personal opinions or thoughts. “Nations who do not feed their young with books are destined for sorrow,” says Ovid. While the Japanese read 25 books, the Swiss 10, and the French 7 on average, our people read one book in 10 years. A Norwegian spends 300 times more time reading books than we do; an American 210, a Japanese person 97 and a Briton 87. Given that the Ministry of Education is the biggest publisher in our country, you should appreciate the fact that we are left with nothing but textbooks. Although we take textbooks in hand, it cannot be claimed that we rank higher in producing science than in reading books. Books are the most effective tools that enable people to develop themselves. “If I hadn’t given one of every two kurus I got when I was a child, I wouldn’t be able to do any of the things I do today,” says Ataturk, thereby putting into words the value he places on reading. Isn’t it a shortcoming that we don’t have a book-reading hour within our families in a society where everybody follows at least one soap opera? Why don’t we have a library for our soul in a house where we have a wardrobe for our clothes and a fridge for our food? Is it less deserving?
To sum up, now that reading is this important, why won’t our people read? Why don’t administrators who oversee them highlight getting familiar with books, or the human wealth, although they keep stressing other situations? Or is it part of the effort to set our people back culturally and socially who have for very long suffered from failure to read? If that’s not the case, how should we explain this ignorance of ours?