Today, my middle child, aged 6, penned and illustrated a graphic novel about a superhero cat fighting against a supervillain wolf. It was incredible; action-packed from cover to cover. My son, aged 5, is also rapidly increasing his literacy: he wrote “I see the little cat” without any prompting and understanding what the sentence meant. He wasn’t repeating a sentence he had seen, he actually assembled a complete and coherent sentence from words he knew.
Literacy is The Great Threshold. It’s the marker between being dependent on the direct attention and teaching of others for all your knowledge and being able to just go binge information on whatever you want. One of the greatest miracles in history is that someone actually managed to slip the printing press past all the tyrants and despots of the world. I wonder if they truly knew what they were unleashing.
The Opportunity Machine 