Should your child be learning the art of slow reading?
By Marjorie Kehe / Christian Science Monitor

Left - As concerns grow that the Internet is making us intellectually shallow, some educators are rallying behind the slow-reading movement.

Is the Internet making us intellectually shallow? Yes, says journalist Nicholas Carr, among others. In his new book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Carr concludes that the Internet is changing not only what we think about (gossip, up-to-the-minute news) but how we think. “Media ... supply the stuff of thought,” he writes, and “also shape the process of thought.”
For many of today's readers – young ones in particular – reading has come to mean a rapid skim across a sea of websites, text messages, and e-mails.
Thomas Newkirk, a professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, is one of a growing number of educators concerned that – in the rush to race through more material – something essential is being lost. "You see schools where reading is turned into a race, you see kids on the stopwatch to see how many words they can read in a minute," he told the Associated Press. "That tells students a story about what reading is. It tells students to be fast is to be good."

Like the slow-eating movement, the slow-reading movement is focused on enhancing the elements of pleasure and discovery. Among other techniques, Newkirk favors a return to practices like reading aloud and memorization to help students "taste" – rather than fly by – the words that they read.

Although The Slow Book Movement was officially founded just last year in Lebanon Springs, N.Y., by novelist I. Alexander Olchowski, the concept of slow reading is not new. Nietzsche makes a reference to slow reading in the preface to his 1887 work "Daybreak." In his 1994 book, "The Gutenberg Elegies" American essayist and literary critic Sven Birkerts writes about the need for "deep reading," which he defines as "the slow and meditative possession of a book."
Full sstory at CSM.