2023-04-16 20:20:00
Reading requires calm and personal space. Photo SHUTTERSTOCK
George Steiner – one of the most important ecumenical thinkers of our time – in his conversations with the French journalist and writer Laure Adler, as recorded in the great book “A Long Saturday” (trans. Thanos Samartzis, ed. Doma), says: “The reading has some fairly specific requirements. First of all it requires a lot of quiet. Silence has become the greatest luxury, the most expensive commodity in the world.” Second condition: “A private space at home where it’s us and our book, we can engage in this dialogue without others present.” Peace and private space, then. As a third condition Steiner sets the existence of books at home. “Great public libraries were the foundation of education and learning in the 19th century, and for many in the 20th. But having your own collection of books that you haven’t borrowed is of the utmost importance.”
Education and cultural institutions have the role of mitigating socio-economic differences and working in favor of improving the standard of living of individuals, given that this is determined by economic comfort but also by the cultural capital that the individual carries. The move away from the book of any form – let alone the printed one – is an international phenomenon. As Steiner emphatically says, “in big cities, quiet is bought with gold”, personal time is missing and the screens of mobile phones and tablets dominate our daily lives. It is extremely important that the OECD in the 2025 PISA competition will also assess the ability of teenagers to expand their horizons in the digital world.
Of course, since 2000, their evaluation in text comprehension has been preceded. An assessment in which Greece is stepping firmly. Today, the Greek school, as determined by the detailed programs of the Ministry of Education, as well as the actions of the Ministry of Culture, seems trapped in form without substance. There is the decision of the Ministry of Education from 2022 to expand the network of school libraries, however, in practice, there are few schools that are interested in front of all the school units, while the work done in them is procedural and inefficient.
The curriculum suffocates under the weight of “basic” lessons, it does not give breath for something “alternative” such as training children to read books at home, it does not teach them to mark the points that impressed them, to enjoy them. And text comprehension has ended up being a formal apprenticeship of students in the way an exposition of (trivial) ideas is written. As for homework, the students’ workload does not give them time to read a literary text.
The Department of Culture, for its part, is essentially absent, it has not built any bridge between reading and school practice. What writer walks into classrooms at regular intervals and offers students the method to find the “spaces” that will allow them to quietly enjoy a literary text instead of parroting it for a good grade? Therefore, any declarations end up heavy, but blank pages…
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