However trashy pulp fiction might be, it had to be read. Youngsters avid for the corny, lightning-jagged… — Isaac Asimov
However trashy pulp fiction might be, it had to be read. Youngsters avid for the corny, lightning-jagged, cliché-ridden, clumsy stories had to read words and sentences to satisfy their craving. It trained everyone who read it in literacy, and a small percentage of them may that have passed on to better things.
Now consider what has happened since.…
In general, the trend over the last half century or so has been away from the word to the picture. The comic magazines increased the level of looking, decreased the level of reading. The television set is carried this to an extreme.
p. 46Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
Nor did I learn about sex from any reasoned source of instruction. I learned about it from the distorted and imperfect knowledge of other boys. This is the usual fate enforced upon youngsters by a society that is too prim and too hypocritical to have sex taught like any other branch of knowledge.
Considering how important sex is, how great a source of joy, how enormous a source of misery and disease, how is permeates the workings of courtship and marriage, isn’t it strange that we go to great lengths to teach our children to play football and make no effort whatever to teach them to play sex?
p. 93
There are no nations! There is only humanity. And if we don’t come to understand that right soon, there will be no nations, because there will be no humanity.
p. 421
Publishers, with their usual bravery, dumbed down their books in order to make money at the expense of leaving American children undereducated or, worse, miseducated.
p. 306
