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Aug 2006 Issue
by Jamie Huston
A college English professor once told me that he always knew who the religious kids in his class were because they were the students who understood symbolism, imagery, and themes. Having been raised with the Bible, these students had something the others typically lacked: years of experience studying deep literature.
There are plenty of reasons to make literacy a core concern in our households: the classics are a proven method of training and never go out of style, language acquisition in children is highly correlated with later intelligence, most tests and classes are largely vocabulary-based, and the Book of Mormon frequently promotes literacy. Indeed, higher rates of education have been shown to coincide with higher rates of church activity for Latter-day Saints.
But there’s another reason you may not have known. In Cutting: Understanding and Overcoming Self-Mutilation, a counseling guide about the growing problem of people who physically hurt themselves, Steven Levenkron writes, “The individual who needs this kind of solution is a person who cannot… articulate what she is so angry about. The self-mutilator… has no language with which to describe it to others.”
In other words, language is how we interact with the world and deal with emotions. A lack of those skills can be very dangerous.
My family has a routine: every day after scripture study, we keep reading. We take turns reading aloud and discussing a few pages of some great book. We have finished Charlotte’s Web, Little House On The Prairie, A Wrinkle In Time, The Hobbit, and others, including versions of classics that have been adapted for children, like Tales From Shakespeare and Oliver Twist.
As my old professor had observed, these things come naturally to religious homes. There is already a foundation of respect and appreciation for history’s written wonders in our church. Building on it will help grow a richer life for our families and ourselves.
