[teh603]

Originally Posted by TFeldt

Thought the Hardy boys, and serials in general, was a rather enlightened reply. Never knew the resistance towards new'ness was as vicious back then, thank you all for the information.

Same here, I loved reading them. Course my parents also provided me with vintage Donald Duck comic books, National Geographic, and the bedtime story was almost always something from mom's big stack o' pulp sci-fi and fantay. But to be honest, "intellectual laziness" be damned if it gets the kids to actually reading. Most of the runts I see at work can't even read aloud, they just call out words without actual comprehension of what they're reading and then cause trouble when they figure out the teacher knows they're illiterate. They're so afraid of reading by that point that they can't comprehend that reading could be fun and entertaining.

The fact that the textbook contains only boring garbage doesn't help either. The children aren't learning that reading is fun, they're being taught that reading is hard labor going all the way back to 6th Grade when they first encounter a literature textbook and find out they're expected to be able to read at their grade level. Don't ask me what they're doing with them in the elementary schools, but I doubt it involves real education.

Although if anyone today were to complain about the Hardy Boys encouraging "intellectual laziness," I'd point to the fact that SpongeBob is proven to be more damaging to a child's attention span than any work of literature, cheap trash included.

I'd go more with basic psychology though. What defines "cool"? Let's make it more personal, what are the qualities that adhere to a cool person? Is it the jock that surrounds himself with admiring peers and cheerleaders? I'd say that the concept of what is cool is a mutual understanding between individuals, the pack or swarm mentality. The coolest, or most admired / envied, person is the alpha of the pack. Would a person be cool if he had nobody to be "cool" to, after all?

Basic tribal behavior. For there to be an "us" there has to be a "them" we can reject. Although I'll bet dollars to donuts the jocks are only interested in the girls because their tribal programming tells them to. *evil giggle*

Reading is a solitary action. It's on the large part anti-social behavior, even though I (personally) love discussing what I've read with other people afterwards. But the act itself remains a personal and reclusive event. There's steps you can do to alleviate this fact, a room full of people could listen to an audiobook for instance but let's be honest, how many of us have ever done that (or even -want- to do that)?

Dunno, people used to cluster around the radio to listen to the old radio shows before the era of TV. Some of them were pretty good, cheesy sound effects aside. I used to have some records and cassettes from back in that day- Flash Gordon, Sergeant Preston, The Shadow, ones like that. But since visual entertainment has replaced auditory entertainment, that era has since passed and most people born in the '60s or later probably can't comprehend it anyway.

Thus, reading cannot be cool since you're not part of a pack when you do it. I'm no psychologist so I might very well be talking out of my behind here, but that's how I've always seen it.

From where I'm standing (minor in Anthropology, and considering going to grad school in that field) you're bang on. I don't put much stock in shrinkology, though, so YMMV.