On reading

Inside Higher Ed has a nice article this week called A Place to Read, in which colleges are gently scolded for not providing enough places for students to read books, and gives reasons why colleges should care. It also places the onus on students to actively seek out places to read.

I was moved by this article in several ways:
1) The author echoes my own thoughts about reading and its importance perfectly. I am a voracious reader, and I treasure those (increasingly few) moments of pure reading pleasure - me, curled up on a puffy couch with some impossibly large book in hand ... and perhaps a notebook or a pad of post-it notes if I'm feeling very full of myself.
2) I can think of nothing else that I do as well as read, and there is no other skill I have that helps me more in my professional and personal life than reading. And yet reading is so simple. It pains me when I hear that students don't/won't read for fun.
3) Finding a good place to read IS difficult, but not impossible.
4) Reading on a screen can be a good supplement to reading in book format. (Imagine being able to read - or better yet, edit - wikipedia while you're reading a book about that subject. I do this frequently.) But it's not a replacement for reading without the screen. (I am probably in the minority thinking this.) One thing that reading screen-free does is it forces you to compose your questions, ask them after finishing reading (not during), and then go back to the reading. There are cases when this can be enormously helpful to provide clarity of thought -- as opposed to schizophrenic back-and-forth between the book and screen, and "hyperlinking tangents"... following the hyperlinked bunny trail far, far from your original innocent clarification question. Becoming distracted or even bored by the non-screen material is a serious problem to reading in tandem with a screen.

Hurrah for more non-screen time. I resolve to do it myself.

Difference between education and training

Are you being trained or educated? From a very controversial writer and educator, David Noble, in an older issue of Monthly Review:

[E]ducation must be distinguished from training ... because the two are so often conflated. In essence, training involves the honing of a person’s mind so that it can be used for the purposes of someone other than that person. Training thus typically entails a radical divorce between knowledge and the self. Here knowledge is usually defined as a set of skills or a body of information designed to be put to use, to become operational, only in a context determined by someone other than the trained person; in this context the assertion of self is not only counterproductive, it is subversive to the enterprise.

"Education is the exact opposite of training in that it entails not the disassociation but the utter integration of knowledge and the self, in a word, self-knowledge. Here knowledge is defined by and, in turn, helps to define, the self. Knowledge and the knowledgeable person are basically inseparable."

So education is about learning for oneself, and training is about learning for the sake of someone else.