The Cornerstones of Civilized Life

Comprehending, assimilating and utilizing the printed word

All the negative effects of crime comics on children in the intellectual, emotional and volitional spheres are intensified by the harm done in the perceptual sphere. Comic books are death on reading.

The dawn of civilization was marked by the invention of writing. Reading, therefore, is not only one of the cornerstones of civilized life; it is also one of the main foundations of a child's adjustment to it.

Children are like flowers. If the soil is good and the weather is not too catastrophic, they will grow up well enough. You do not have to threaten them, you do not have to psychoanalyze them, and you do not have to punish them any more than wind and storm punish flowers. But there are some things you have to bring to them, teach them, patiently and expertly. The most important of these is reading. A readiness to learn to read is developed by healthy children spontaneously. But for the reading process, and especially for the habit of reading, comprehending, assimilating and utilizing the printed word, the child requires the help of his elders.

When we indulge in huge generalizations in discussing such questions as why people act this way or that, why they believe or tolerate this or that, or the other, we usually forget the simple question of why it is that so many people cannot read properly. Statistics on illiteracy indicate not only that many people do not read books, but also that many cannot read well enough to absorb a book or an average magazine article. According to Ruth McCoy Harris, in an article on reading, one out of twenty-five Americans cannot read at all, and three out of five adults "do not read well. Millions read nothing but the comics."

Reading difficulties in childhood constitute one of the most important areas of mental hygiene. This has been recognized by the establishing of what Dr. Stella Center, a remedial-reading expert, calls "a new institution in the educational world," reading clinics. Reading clinics are unfortunately very few, children with reading difficulties unbelievably numerous.

According to a survey made by a committee and presented at the Secondary Education Board in 1951, 5 per cent to 10 per cent of high school children and college students are so deficient in reading that they need individual remedial instruction, and an additional 10 per cent to 15 per cent read so poorly that small group instruction for them is desirable. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, 12 per cent of all American children fail in learning to read as well as the average of their class.

A survey sponsored by the New York City Association of Teachers of English and the New York City Association of Teachers of Speech, made public in 1952, reveals these significant data: of students entering high school as freshmen, 33 per cent are retarded at least one year in reading; by the time these students have reached the fifth term the percentage has risen to 40 per cent. Of the children routinely referred to the Queens General Hospital Mental Hygiene Clinic for any reason, every eighth child had a reading problem. Sometimes this had not been recognized before either by teacher or parents, and the child had been punished without the root of his difficulties being known to him or his guardians.

Reading troubles in children are on the increase. An important cause of this increase is the comic book. A very large proportion of children who cannot read well habitually read comic books. They are not really readers, but gaze mostly at the pictures, picking up a word here and there. Among the worst readers is a very high percentage of comic-book addicts who spend a preponderance of spare time "reading" comic books. They are book worms without books.

Parents and other adults are often deceived into believing the children can read because they "read so many comics." In teaching children to read, the schools have to compete with the pictures of comic books. Low-grade literacy is the long-range result. One of the Lafargue researchers, a physician, visited the library of a public school. There were about thirty boys there. Two of them were reading newspapers and eleven of them were reading comic books.

Scientific understanding of reading disorders requires a knowledge of the research done on reading during the last few decades, of brain pathology, of the modern psychological tests - general, projective and special reading tests - a psychiatric understanding of children, and a concrete acquaintance with the social conditions of children and the educational process that affects them.

Reading is not a circumscribed, isolated function of the brain, but a highly complex performance. Visual comprehension contains many more abstract elements than, for example, motor behavior. Psychologically speaking, reading is a very high performance. To see a real apple and try to grasp it is much simpler than to read the word apple, which is on the one hand an abstraction and yet has potentially many associations not only visually but also in the sphere of hearing, touch, smell and taste.

Reading disorders are much more frequent in some countries than in others - in the United States and England, for example, rather than in Germany. In a study of 51,000 children in the schools of Munich, contrary to expectation, only ten were found (ages ten to fourteen) with serious reading disorders. So, it is not accidental that most of the research in this field has been done in England and the United States. The difference in frequency may have little to do with the methods of examination or the methods used in teaching reading, or with any differences between German and English and American children. It is the result of differences in the language itself.

In the English language, spelling is much more difficult because the spelling and the sound may be so different. The child has to learn to pronounce a word differently from what it seems to be according to its spelling. The letter a, for instance, has to be pronounced differently in different words, while for the child learning to read in German the letter a has only one visual vocal association. In English, the letter u may represent twenty-four different sounds.

Fred’s Video Collection

Amazing Adult Fantasy (retitled Amazing Fantasy in its final issue) is an American comic book anthology series published by Marvel Comics in 1961-1962. The final 1960s issue, Amazing Fantasy #15 cover-dated Aug. 1962, on sale 5 Jun 1962 introduced The Amazing Spider-Man. It is currently the most valuable comic book in existence, though by no means the oldest. (Note the .02 price increase with issue #9.)