The attention span of children may be one of the main reasons why an immersion in on-screen reading is so engaging, and it may also be why digital reading may ultimately prove antithetical to the long-in-development, reflective nature of the expert reading brain as we know it.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the potential impact of digital reading on children's attention spans and expert reading skills.
Maryanne Wolf emphasizes the dual nature of digital reading for children: while it captivates their attention, it may inadvertently hinder the development of deep, reflective reading skills. This tension between engagement and cognitive growth raises important questions about how technology shapes our reading habits and mental processes.
In practice
In a discussion on children's learning habits, this quote can illustrate the potential risks of technology in education.
Digital technology can be a great resource, but it can also be a pernicious one, so it's how we, as a society, really study the cognitive impact of that and use evidence-based research to go after the technology designers to do a better job of dealing with the problems of memory and attention we are seeing.
In reading, we are both scientists and poets.
The acquisition of literacy is one of the most important epigenetic achievements of Homo sapiens. To our knowledge, no other species ever acquired it.
The quality of our reading is not only an index of the quality of our thought; it is our best-known route to developing whole new pathways in the cerebral evolution of our species.
There's a richness that reading gives you, an opportunity to probe more than any other medium I know of. Reading is about not being content with the surface.
There's no question that our children's attention and memory is changing when they are reading too long, too much, too early on digital screens.
History can come in handy. If you were born yesterday, with no knowledge of the past, you might easily accept whatever the government tells you. But knowing a bit of history--while it would not absolutely prove the government was lying in a given instance--might make you skeptical, lead you to ask questions, make it more likely that you would find out the truth.
The PhD system is the real root of the evil of academic snobbery. People who have PhDs consider themselves a priesthood, and inventors generally don't have PhDs.
If a person has a contribution to make, he must make it in public. If learning is not made public, it is a waste.
One has to grow up with good talk in order to form the habit of it.
The primary goal in the education of children is to teach, and to give the example of, a virtuous life.
It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed.
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