The value of the printed book
Children are like anthropologists in the face of a large and isolated tribe. They closely observe the customs of adults and discover everything that is right and wrong, what they should and should not do. They learn to walk and talk, to behave and to be silent. They are not yet able to judge the customs of adults, but little by little they learn to like even what at first seemed uncomfortable or bad, like ice cream that freezes the mouth and is deliciously sweet.
These little anthropologists walk around the city and see banks, churches, police stations, some clothing and shoe stores, restaurants, lottery shops, a hamburger shop that will open only at night and a newsstand that survives from selling cell phone credit and crossword puzzles. Quietly the city is saying everything that matters to adults.
Among other things, for example, the city says that a lot of people like clothes. Adults praise each other’s clothes and want shoes and blouses that they find in dozens of shop windows, long before children care about their appearance. Observing the customs of adults, children quickly understand that clothes play a greater role than protecting the body. Which exactly? It does not matter. Clothes matter.
Likewise, children understand that police stations, banks, forums and city halls have a special role in the city. Which one? They have no idea, but they are large and imposing buildings, that can be found in any city. Adults speak with a certain respect, fear or even hatred about these places, but they are always talking about them. Children still don’t understand the concept of “institution”, even though they are already familiarizing themselves with these important places that lead life in society.
Religions survive in our times precisely because they are institutions, rooted in society. Every square has a church and almost every place has an image, bracelet, sticker or anything else that refers to some religion. This means that, even with atheistic parents or simply disinterested in the fate of their souls, children are surrounded by religiosity. The more fervent the parents’ beliefs, the greater the role of religion, whatever it may be. If they are surrounded by people with the same religion as their parents, this assimilation will be even greater, which explains why religions are limited by natural barriers and even by invisible borders. Growing up attending Catholic churches and surrounded by Catholics is unlikely to make you animistic.
We are not limited by the medium, but it exerts tremendous force on our decisions and especially on things that we never consciously decide, such as the taste for clothes, the consumption of ultra-processed foods and even religion. Children hardly question the reality that they do not yet understand enough, unconcerned about imagining that the world may be different from how it is presented. They entrust adults with judgments and decisions that are still far from a nuisance to their minds. Even as adults, most ideas will never be questioned, simply because they have never been confronted.
This does not mean that children learn only what we teach, they learn much more. An adult who preaches the importance of good food, while licking his fingers smeared with fried food, is teaching more than he intended. The same is true of those who always say that school will guarantee a career, but do not even remember what it is like to be in a classroom, or who guarantee that reading is important, and proudly lift the only book that rests on the shelf ( the dusty Bible or “The Secret”). Children know the difference between words and actions. They grow up learning to be like their parents and not what their parents want for them.
Notice now that in the second paragraph I did not mention “bookstores”. I did not mention them because in the square of my city it would not be possible to find one, or even outside it. Perhaps in the whole city, with its 150 thousand inhabitants, there are two or three bookstores. There are libraries, it’s true, far from downtown and people, which helps children to grow up more used to shop windows than to books. It’s quite embarrassing to think that our civilization can easily be summed up in food courts and stores of uselessness.
Useless products stores fill up while bookstores close their doors, but not everything is lost. Society always advances in a certain direction until it discovers that it is not possible to continue, so it calls this point an extreme and dives in the opposite direction, until it discovers what it will call the opposite extreme. Thus the excesses are compensated and the society flows within an increasingly constant average, trimming the excesses until it finds a situation close to the ideal.
This is what happens with ultra-processed food. We probably reached in the last few years extreme fastfood consumption and now we are plunging into a vegan and organic wave of locally produced foods that force the industry to adapt itself. It was necessary to reach the limit and reach alarming levels of obesity, but we are learning the lesson. I am sure that the next generations will have much less contact with fastfood than I had in my childhood, or at least they will have more contact with healthy options, which will influence their decisions.
The example matters. Like healthy foods, parks and museums, bookstores need to occupy space on the horizon of new generations. They need to contaminate the air with the smell of thousands of prints, colorful shelves and endless promises of new knowledge, worlds and perspectives. Reading areas that arouse some curiosity in the little ones, when trying to understand what can be so interesting in those pages that entertain adults.
Digital books are an important advance, but that does not mean that printed books are doomed. On the contrary, they must fill the shelves, weigh in the backpacks and crumple between the fingers of the most frequent readers. Printed books must be within reach of those who have not yet discovered the pleasure of reading.
I already talked about education in:
