Annual BookFest is reminder of the importance of reading

It is a symbol of all that Homo sapiens have achieved over several billion years.

With this combination – innate ability to speak, creation of alphabet, invention of the printing press – it became possible to permanently record knowledge for anyone to read or use anytime, a revolutionary change from memory and oral recitation as the only way to transmit knowledge and experience.

Of all the necessary ingredients needed for civilized progress, it is no exaggeration to say that no other combination has contributed more.

Illiteracy, the inability to read, and aliteracy, able to read but unwilling or habitually read junk, are major tragedies for the individual, community, nation and world in unrealized potential.

Illiterates must learn to live in a different world. Aliterates, the vast majority, are not much better off because their world and lives are smaller.

Aliterates, sadly, have not discovered the transforming magic of books. They only read when required. They have not felt the exhilaration of discovering the right book at the right time; of reading a book of several hundred pages and having a eureka experience after reading one word, phrase, sentence or paragraph; of sitting in a reading trance on a rainy day, reading a book that resonates for the first or umpteenth reading.

I have nonfiction books, highlighted and filled with marginalia, that I re-read about every other year and gain a new insight every time.

Speaking is innate, but reading must be acquired.

In her book ‘‘Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain,” Maryanne Wolf, professor of child development and cognitive neuroscience, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University in Massachusetts and a leader in research on dyslexia, writes ‘‘The reading brain is part of highly successful two-way dynamic. Reading can be learned only because of the brain’s plastic design, and when reading takes place that individual brain is forever changed, both physiologically and intellectually ... We are what we read.”

Who is and is not denied access to knowledge and education is one of the primary themes that runs through the history and sociology of knowledge.

Thus, a book festival in a predominantly African-American community like Prince George’s County should be a remembrance and celebration. Remembrance of more than 300 years of denial of access and a celebration of opportunities hard earned with blood, sweat, toil, tears and determination.

A literate slave was a dangerous slave. After the Civil War, especially in the former Confederate states where about 3 million former slaves lived, the mantra was education ruined good field hands.

It was a violation of law to teach a slave or for a slave or ex-slave to teach themselves. Extreme violence was used to quickly squash any sign of intellectual ambition.

This barbaric legacy of exclusion remains. Habitual reading and a life filled with books remains a class, caste and racial divide, and is at the top of the list in the struggle to improve overall academic achievement in predominantly African-American public schools.

Controlling access to knowledge is a precursor to controlling power. Those who are not habitual readers of nonfiction and high quality fiction disempower themselves.

Many are intellectually crippled for life. Some will terrorize our neighborhoods and populate our prisons. Others will become literate but will never realize their full potential or glimpse and enjoy the life of the mind essential for creating and advancing knowledge — all the consequences of not being read to and not reading.

Van Caldwell, a lawyer, lives in Kettering. He will be hosting several discussions at the BookFest and can be e-mailed atwvcaldwell@comcast.net.