Assistant Principal - Pastoral Care
Reading and Writing: The Foundations of a Hope-Filled Future
In a recent article lamenting the unfolding disaster that is the Trump Presidency, US columnist, David Brooks identified the root cause of such government policy as the American peoples declining rates of literacy. He argues that literacy is the backbone of reasoning ability, the source of the background knowledge you need to make good decisions in a complicated world. As the retired general Jim Mattis and Bing West once wrote, “If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.”
Life is filled with hard choices: whom to marry, whom to vote for, whether to borrow money, where my children should go to school. To make these calls, you have to be able to discern what is central to the situation, envision possible outcomes, understand other minds, and calculate probabilities.
To do this, you have to train your own mind, especially by reading and writing. As Johann Hari wrote in his book ‘Stolen Focus,’ “The world is complex and requires steady focus to be understood; it needs to be thought about and comprehended slowly.” Reading a book puts you inside another person’s mind in a way that a Facebook post just doesn’t.
Writing is the discipline that teaches you to take a jumble of thoughts and cohere them into a compelling point of view. It is how we organise and order our thinking and then make this thinking comprehensible for others. A Sydney Morning Herald journalist Rob Harris, wrote about the significant effect his History teacher had upon his career and life. He said that she helped him understand “that words, when used carefully, can shape how we understand the world.”
Reading is the hallmark of highly successful people - from billionaire businessmen like Warren Buffett to politicians such as President Obama who is well known for being a voracious reader. He’s been described as the President most influenced by reading and writing since Abraham Lincoln.
Reading was critical for Obama during his younger years. It’s how he discovered what he believed in and stood for. This dates back to his teenage years when he was reading Baldwin, Ellison, Hughes, Wright, DuBois, and Malcolm X. Later, in his college years, he immersed himself in philosophy, studying St. Augustine, Nietzsche, Emerson, Sartre and Niebuhr. He used these texts to strip down his beliefs so he could build them back up.
During his years in the White House, his passion for reading never faded. In fact, it helped him through many difficult times.
“At a time when events move so quickly and so much information is transmitted,” he said, reading gave him the ability to “slow down and get perspective, and to get in somebody else’s shoes. These two things have been invaluable to me. Whether they’ve made me a better president I can’t say. But what I can say is that they have allowed me to sort of maintain my balance during the course of eight years, because this is a place that comes at you hard and fast and doesn’t let up.”
Writings from Lincoln, MLK Jr., Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela were “particularly helpful when what you wanted was a sense of solidarity,” said Obama, adding “during very difficult moments, this job can be very isolating. So sometimes you have to sort of hop across history to find folks who have been similarly feeling isolated, and that’s been useful.”
Mick Larkin
Assistant Principal - Pastoral Care
mlarkin@arm.catholic.edu.au