The need for university students to start reading
Introduction
Do university students need to learn to read? The question thus raised requires specifying some terms, whose definition will serve to draw the postulates that guide the reflections of this essay.
The need and learning are manifested as concepts not exempt from ambiguity and impregnated with an axiological burden. What should we understand by necessity? The individual’s need? The need for society? Since both notions of need can contrast (the struggle between the specific individual and the society that determines and oppresses is an old, always current topic of literature and philosophy), it is necessary to assume a position around the term; A position that, without ignoring the moral and even contradictory implications of both ends of need, serve at least to guide in a consistent way the reflections of this writing. For the purposes of this essay, the need will first be a social need. The initial question could, in that sense, interpret how university students need to learn to read to adapt to the social environment?, Or does society need university students to learn to read? The question thus raised does not avoid the individual aspect of need; Rather, put it in context, places the individual in specific circumstances from which he is required to develop a certain skill or competition, reading competition.
Despite the apparent restrictions imposed on the individual dimension, it manifests itself with vivid strength in the second concept to be specified. By learning, the accumulation of experiences that, endlessly throughout the person’s life, mold their being must be understood.
The concept is not limited to formal learning or some particular type of learning, whether practical, theoretical or moral. Seen learning, the expression learning to read does not refer exclusively to the learning of the rules and skills that govern what we commonly call reading: decipher the content of a text and link it in various ways, with less or greater difficulty, With less or greater depth, to personal experience. Goes further: it involves the person’s ability to build himself from and through written text. The experience of reading, when you live fully, transcends the immediate purposes of the act of reading (informing, entertaining, fulfilling academic or labor obligations, etc.), however complex and stimulating that they are, and becomes a medium privileged for self-knowledge and to relate intimately and committed to the surrounding reality. Thus, the terms, the question that motivates this essay may be read as follows: do university students need to learn to read their own reality in the texts and, in that means, to be consciously interested in that reality, in understanding it, enjoying it and transform it, recognizing it as the possible scenario of every human eagerness, own and alien? Or simpler: do university students need to learn to read, with that, learn to live?
Located the coordinates of reflection, it is now possible to address the content of this essay.
Does the society need that university students learn to read?
Before answering the issue, it is imposed to raise this other: what does society need the university students?
The Modern University was established on the basis of some needs of the ascending liberal society. The university thus constituted is a modern invention, even more than the university as such, as a center of knowledge and teaching, be it an institution of medieval origin. The needs of the liberal society to which the university could respond were at least two: on the one hand, harmonize individual aspirations, favored by liberal ideology, with the social and institutional order; On the other, raise the preeminence of scientific knowledge to institutional rank (Benavides Martínez, Chávez González, Infante Bonfiglio and Moreno García, 2009). Let’s explain. The university would thus be the space par excellence to fulfill individual aspirations (access to a profession, socially climb) and social (professionals to fulfill the multiple functions of an increasingly complex modern society) and the site, also par excellence , to cultivate the scientific paradigm, which would have to become the ideal paradigm to combat and replace old notions of the world linked to dogma and monarchical power. The current university has not diverted from that ideal: it forms individuals, it serves society, celebrates and keeps the scientific paradigm as a guide for the present. For that, society needs university students.
Now, let’s address the central issue of this section. Reading is, perhaps, the most obvious manifestation of that scientific paradigm. Scientific culture is essentially a written culture, a culture that is reflected, disseminated and debated through written text. Thus there is very explicitly specific area. The discoveries and analysis, successes and failures, as well as the perspectives of many researchers over the years, are recorded in literature ”(APA, 2010, P. 9). If the university is the access door of individuals to the cultivation of scientific knowledge, and if scientific knowledge is reflected in the writings, the answer to the question of whether society needs university students to learn to read seems to jump into sight as An obvious and indisputable fact.
It is possible, however, to delve into the matter. Note that, until now, the circumstances in which you learn to read have not been touched. It has not been discussed when, where or how you learn. Actually, it could well be assumed that the university contributes nothing to the development of reading competition, which is acquired before, elsewhere. Are not the subjects, long before entering the university, learn to read? But intentionally the initial issue suggests that university students, being university students, learn to read. That is, by showing the issue in those terms, it has been suggested, not naive, that a certain learning of reading is possible and even necessary in the university age. What learning is that and why should it be presented just at that age?
As a way of channeling the ideas of this essay, students of Psychology of the Metropolitan University of Monterrey have been questioned in recent days that are about to conclude their third tetramestre – that is, that they take a third of their degree – a third of their bachelor’s degree – If university students need to learn to read. They have unanimously responded that yes. They have experienced difficulties in accessing professional level texts, scientific texts. The school training had given them until then the foundations for deciphering written messages, but nothing and no one had yet prepared them to face texts with greater complexity, typical of university training. They have acquired awareness that reading learning is a continuum that goes beyond a specific period of life. They confirm certain statements from Solé (2012), who argues that it is not enough to restrict reading competition to its initial acquisition, but that the subject must learn to read in various ways; life itself demands it like this. And one of those learning is related precisely with the demands of university life. The Higher Education student, explains Flores Guerrero (2016), needs to solve cognitively demanding problems, for which it requires being competent in reading and critical thinking skills; And right at the base of students’ intellectual and cognitive improvement, there are tasks such as reading and writing, which have an observable impact on the development of critical thinking.
Do university students need to learn to read, with that, learn to live?
The case is real: a former psychology student at the Monterrey Metropolitan University opened an office and began receiving patients. A few months later she expressed the next complaint from her Facebook wall: how difficult it was for her patients from the psychological consultation to be able to express in words, with common words and currents, what they felt, what made them suffer. From that example it seems that a certain deal with words is indispensable not only to fulfill some of the practical tasks of life, those that fill the time and seek sustenance, but to simply be in a position to make knowledge with knowledge with oneself and feel good.
Reading is made of words, of those same words with which the individual seeks to express what he thinks and what he feels. Those of which social life arise and, now it is clear to us, also intimate life, personal life. The inner voice also manifests with words. And yes: in the words, the words that are heard inside and also in those that emerge to the public space, there is an emotional component. This is known by writers and poets, as well as those who have used words to caress and insult, to love and despise; That is, we all know. Is reading, activity whose most obvious bricks are just the words, exempt from this emotional ingredient? It is enough to go to the reading experience of each one, even to the most incipient experience, to immediately recognize that reading is a potential source of pleasure or displeasure. Rarely the person approaches with indifference to the text. The experience of reading is conditioned by the sympathies and antipathies of whom he reads. He is oneself when reads, as he is himself when he is spoken, when he loves, when he lives. Reading is not an activity that manifests itself in a space outside life, in a non-space, in a vital flow parenthesis. Reading occurs in life, in concrete circumstances, and is carried out by specific individuals, with particular qualities. Not everything in life is to read, but everything that is read is linked in one way or another to life, to concrete lives, at the circumstances of beings that have a name and surname.
Perhaps that is why reading is difficult, perhaps that is why university students have delayed so many years to learn to read, because reading demands not only the domain of particular skills, but a complex wisdom and nourished by experience, nourished by life. And there is more. Reading also seems to demand a certain vital mood, an optimistic predisposition towards the text. An example only: according to the OECD, reading for pleasure and reading competition are associated. The OECD test, the PISA test, internationally applied to 15 -year -old students and that includes among its elements the evaluation of reading compete Schooling to those who do not (OECD, 2011, cited by Flores Guerrero, 2016). How is this fusion achieved between an activity such as reading, full of difficulties, and the feeling of pleasure? The finding of the OECD is contrasted with the traditional idea, or rather with the cliché, that books are essentially fatigueous and that reading is a painful task, so much so that educators and cultural managers have to resort to all class of stratagems to interest young people in reading. In opposition to the cliché, there seems to be enough young people (enough to establish a statistically significant finding) that abbreviate some form of happiness in what they read. And this pleasure allows them to nurture the reading and achieve a better understanding of the written word, enough to overcome their peers of the same age. Isn’t this what we were looking for when referring to the case of that young psychologist overwhelmed by the fact that her patients do not know how to put in words what they feel? Wouldn’t those patients win much, would not advance a good stretch in their healing process, if they frequent the written word and nourish their stimulus?
But be careful to affirm that books and reading are as pleasant as life; In fact they are not: life holds surprises that books can never replace. A reading promotion strategy that tries to invite young people to replace their vital experiences for free experiences would be condemned to failure. Rather, you have to assume that reading and books help to understand life, enjoy it more. They facilitate the search for meaning. Reading for pleasure is a step in the right direction to get to know oneself and face the world.
That is why a pedagogue like Freire would have to emphasize the role that reading plays in the liberation of the person. For Freire, reading did not consist of a mere decipher the written codes, but in a reading and appropriation of reality, a reality with which it is possible to dialogue (Fernández Fernández, 2007). In Freire, reading is an instrument of liberation, and not only individual: it is also a way of access to social improvement, living conditions. Perhaps it is not accidental that the best evaluated countries in the reading competition of the PISA test are usually countries that have reached a certain level of prosperity, countries in which individuals have resolved the most basic emergencies. The school failure, explain Hernández Monroy and González Díaz (2009), keeps a correlation with economic deficiencies and cultural lacks. It is not a simple cognitive deficiency. It is not something that can be blamed exclusively to the subjects who experience it. School failure, and with it the failure in the acquisition and development of reading competence, is a social phenomenon, attributable to clearly indicated social factors.
Learn to read in the university space, really learn to read, to connect with the written word and turn it into an extension of one’s life and an instrument of dialogue with others and with oneself, it should be a very valuable condition, Perhaps indispensable, to gain aware of the social reality itself and contribute to transforming it. And today that human truth and dignity seem to eclipse due to the endorsement of prejudice and manipulation, will it be an act of elementary decency to cultivate, in oneself and others, superior reading skills, those that allow establishing a dialogue Franco and Liberator with the world?
conclusion
The OECD, Freire and the findings of pedagogues and scientists, distant from each other by geography and ideology, point in the same direction: reading has the quality of stimulating individuals and communities. Work in favor of the emotional and health health of societies and their institutions. It is an instrument whose benefits must be sought.
The words, those instruments with which the act of reading is constructed, are the same with which people of any latitude join and demolish, trade and talk, pronounce their hallmarks and are shown before the world. Universities, and with them university students, today have the opportunity to contribute to the great understanding of people and things. It is an opportunity they enjoy from the privilege of knowing how to cultivate the written word. This is a function that is no stranger to the university institution, whose purpose for decades is to contribute to harmonize individual and collective aspirations.
The question that has guided the reflections of this essay must be resolved affirmatively. University students need to learn to read. Society needs to learn. And they need to learn to live, fully with themselves and in a moral commitment to the social reality that hosts them.
References
- American Psychological Association. (2010). APA publications manual. Mexico: The modern manual.
- Benavides Martínez, B., Chávez González, G., Bonfiglio Infante, J. M., & Moreno García, D. (2009). Social context of the profession: Educational approach by competencies. Mexico: Autonomous University of Nuevo León.
- Fernández Fernández, J. A. (2007). Paulo Freire and liberating education. In j. TRILLA BERNET (ED.) The pedagogical legacy of the twentieth century for the 21st century school, pp. 313-342. Spain: Grao.
- Flores Guerrero, D. (2016). The importance and impact of reading, writing and critical thinking in higher education. Next zone of the Institute of Studies in Education University of the North, (24), 128-135. https: // doi.org/10.14482/ZP.24.8727
- Hernández Monroy, R., & González Díaz, M. AND. (2009). Reading practices in the university field. Mexico: Autonomous Metropolitan University, Azcapotzalco Unit.
- Solé, i. (2012). Reading and learning competition. Ibero-American Education Magazine, 59, 43-61. https: // doi.org/10.35362/RIE590456
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