Of Reading Books

By Kim See-bong

Since the school days we've learned that good nutrition enriches our body and good reading our mind. Reading books is to enlighten the mind. Without reading books our eyes can't see though they see and our ears can't hear though they hear.

Reading increases our intelligence. Reading opens our eyes to life and reading enables us to hearken to the world. Such is the importance of reading books in our life that sometimes we evaluate the level of national intelligence according to how many books the people read a month. So in his ``Of studies,’’ Bacon said that ``reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.’’

However, there's one thing about reading we should not overlook; that reading is like food or medicine. Just as too much or random food or medicine does more harm than good, so random and excessive reading often does more harm than good to young children who lack a discerning ability.

Therefore, as there are, for the young, special foods and medicine good for their age, so reading materials should be decided on according to how much and well they digest them.

However, the current reading trend among middle-and high school students has been greatly warped since Seoul National University announced that it will take writing as an important criterion in selecting students.

And now they read only to get a better score in a writing test. They are correct in believing that it requires much reading to write well. But to write well depends on how well they read, how much they understand and how much of what they read they make theirs. Immoderate reading is like an overdose of medicine.

Eight years ago a mother came to my academy (hagwon) with her son, a second year student in middle school and told me that he was not the right type for Korean schools so she wanted to send him to the United States. But she didn't look financially sufficient to send her son there. Later I found out that her husband was one of the few successful chief prosecutors and she was a pharmacist. They belonged to the so-called elite group of Korea. I am sorry to say but his father died in harness the next year.

The story is about the boy. Regarding the school report, he was truly an excellent boy. His TOEFL score was 540 (out of 677), which was, at that time, an exceptional score for a child of his grade, born and educated in Korea. Considering the national average score of English major students didn't reach 500 according to the authorities concerned, I began to place very high expectations upon him.

A few months later I found, to my regret, that there was something weird about him. I had an opportunity to travel with him in the States for one week to interview at the schools he was applying to. And during the period I found his behavior was not ordinary at all judging from his age. Seven boys and girls, all his age, were traveling together. But none of them were like him. He was a so-called a loner.

During the traveling his behavior was so infantile, it made us think there was something wrong with his mentality. Then I realized that he was unable to focus on one thing and the degree was inordinate. Outwardly he looked very intelligent, and sometimes, he was misunderstood as prodigy but in fact he proved nothing but a would-be genius.

He was the type who thinks he knows all the answers and sometimes showed violent behavior. He was excessively lacking in patience and so short-tempered, compared with his peers, that he had to be catered to like a baby. He was also lost in computer games and showed a lack of durability with regulated and patterned academic courses too.

He insisted on having his own way in everything. At the table he was really like a peevish baby. He had no manners at all. For all that, his test scores were always good. But it was true that there was something wrong with his mental stability and he had to give up his plan to study abroad

For all these, he always looked happy. In a good sense, he looked naive, but to be true, he looked short of something and inordinately immature. Later I learned through my experience with my students that he was not the only case. He had the symptoms of the kids who were forced to read books, unprepared, according to their mother's arbitrary standards.

However, most of them fail in the middle of growth and gradually lose interest in studying as they advance to higher grades. In medical science, they call such symptoms ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), a psychiatric disorder.

At that time I remembered what his mom had said to me when she first came to me. ``My son started to read books at such an early age from grade school that sometimes he reads books that are even beyond his father's comprehension. He is reading or studying materials six to seven years ahead of his peers.’’

Lamentably, were she a little wiser, she could have realized that it was a red light warning her to stop.

Had I met the mother earlier, I would have reminded her of what Bertrand Russell said: that there's one thing on which we put too much value, but whose potential problem we disregard too easily.

That is reading. As is written in a book I read, I repeat again that which of the many books should be read and when, ought to be determined only by the child and the suitability of the book must be revealed by the strength of feeling he or she shows in response to what a book evokes in his or her conscious and unconscious mind, not in that of his or her mother. Otherwise, reading can change into a poison. Then, for them, ignorance would be a blessing.

Kim See-bong is administrator of GLS Academy, a private-run language institute, in Daechi-dong, southern Seoul.