Fighting for Literature Amidst A Sea of Trash

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Just a simple piece of what's inside my mind right now - "If I ask a sixth grade about who Carlos P. Romulo is, will he/she give out a sensible answer?"

During these days it seems as if children, or should I say - the younger generation, is quite so much amused with the liberal flow of information that hugs them in this new age of the great Internet.

I noticed that my fifth-grade niece would answer her assignments using 'Google" instead of the encyclopedia. Well, basically, I can't blame her. The .001216567 seconds that it would take for her to get an answer from the big G is of a large difference as compared to the perhaps 2-3 hours (of searching through piles of pages) that using the encyclopedia snatches off from her time.

Perhaps Google is indeed, the universal encyclopedia now. . . And I'm guilty of using this tool too. But I am quite alarmed at how children nowadays deliberately depend on everything regarding their research and school-works to the Internet.

I mean, yeah, the web is much faster as typing and clicking will take just about a fraction of a second to accomplish while scanning and eye-searching will take about an hour or so - BUT - there is actually more danger in using the Internet as a source for academic projects than using books.

Information in the Internet can just go in and out. Whatever info that's glued on a web-page is not actually screened by ANY particular body or organization. Using the Internet as a source of information is solely upon the discretion of the user. The user is the one responsible to "filter" any information that he/she may snatch up from the Internet as either true or not, reliable or just downright fabricated. The thing is, children are also USERS of the Internet, but they don't have the proper skills yet to decipher whether something is indeed significant or trash.

In this particular sense, parents really do have to perform a very important role. I really do suggest that parents should supervise their children in terms of using the Internet.

And as much as possible, children, in their primary stages of education should USE published books. Books are really reliable as these printed papers have gone through a lot of editing before being published.

In addition to this, I think that children should be introduced more to classic books rather than to vampire stories and adult novels.

Gosh, do these kids even know how to locate books in the library? Use the Dewey Decimal System? Use library cards? Or do they even have one?

Just a final note: What will happen to the future of literature, if the world's REAL hope for the future don't even appreciate it?

Related articles

• Let's Do Dewey (mtsu.edu)