The person stops reading. Alexander Gorodnitsky: If people stop reading, they will turn into animals. Readers are more likely to succeed

(1713 - 1784) - an outstanding French writer, playwright and philosopher. Together with, and other great thinkers, he was one of the ideologists of the Enlightenment. Together they compiled the 35-volume "Encyclopedia, or Explanatory Dictionary of Sciences, Arts, Crafts", published from 1751 to 1772. It is believed that it was this monumental work, containing all the knowledge accumulated by mankind by that time, that prepared the cultural ground for the Great French Revolution.

In his writings, Diderot, as a true philosopher-enlightener, promoted rationalism and freethinking. His most famous works were the novels The Nun, Immodest Treasures, Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, and Rameau's Nephew.

We have selected 10 famous aphorisms of Diderot:

A person stops thinking when he stops reading.
A person does nothing if there is no goal and does not do anything great if the goal is insignificant.
The highest degree of human wisdom is the ability to adapt to any circumstances.
Man will not be free until the last king is hung on the guts of the last priest.
Religion prevents people from seeing because, under pain of eternal punishment, it forbids them to see.
Wherever God is recognized, there is a cult, and where there is a cult, the natural order of moral duty is violated, and morality falls.
Take away the fear of hell from a Christian, and you take away his faith.
The God of Christians is a father who treasures his apples extremely and very little his children.
Philosophers say a lot of bad things about clerics, clerics say a lot of bad things about philosophers; but philosophers have never killed ecclesiastics, and the clergy have killed many philosophers.
Telling the truth to some people is like shining a beam of light into an owl's nest. The light will only spoil the eyes of the owls, and they will raise a cry. If people were ignorant only because they did not learn anything, then perhaps they could still be enlightened; but no, there is a system in their blindness... One can reason with a person who errs involuntarily; but from which side to attack the one who stands guard against common sense?

Russia is being turned into a country of fools

The generation that does not read Chekhov, Turgenev, or Jules Verne will grow up cruel and cynical. But in vain.

Their results are such that at least two ministries - culture and education - need to press all the "alarm buttons" and convene emergency meetings of the Cabinet of Ministers.

Because, according to VTsIOM polls, 35% of Russians DO NOT READ BOOKS AT ALL! But Russia, according to the speeches of the president and prime minister, has taken the path to innovative development.

But what kind of innovations, scientific breakthroughs, the development of nanotechnologies, etc., can we talk about if more than a third of the country's population has never picked up a book in a year? None, not even a failed detective!

Why Russia, once the most reading country in the world, has stopped reading and how this threatens society.

Sergey Kapitsa: "Russia is being turned into a country of fools"

The VTsIOM data show that we have finally come to what we have been striving for all these 15 years - brought up a country of idiots. If Russia continues to move along the same course, then in another ten years there will be no one left who today at least occasionally picks up a book.

And we will get a country that will be easier to rule, from which it will be easier to suck out natural resources. But this country has no future! These are the words I said five years ago at a government meeting.

Time passes, and no one even tries to understand and stop the processes that lead to the degradation of the nation.

And labor productivity in society a few decades ago was higher than it is now. Today, almost half of the able-bodied youth work in security organizations!

It turns out that all these young guys are stupid, narrow-minded people who can only beat their faces?

Where does the Volga flow?

And the mind is based on the exchange of information and language. And the greatest tool for exchanging information is the book. Previously, starting from the time of Homer, there was an oral tradition: people sat and listened to the elders, who art form, through the stories and legends of past eras, passed on the experience and knowledge accumulated by the generation.

Then came writing, and with it, reading. The tradition of oral storytelling has died out, and now the tradition of reading is also dying out. Take it somehow and, at least for the sake of curiosity, leaf through the correspondence of the greats. The epistolary heritage of Darwin, which is now being published, is 15 thousand letters. The correspondence of Leo Tolstoy also occupies more than one volume.

And what will remain after the current generation? Will their text messages be published as a warning to posterity?

And the USE, which is used today, cannot give an objective picture of a student's knowledge. It is built only on knowledge or ignorance of the facts. But facts are not everything! Does the Volga flow into the Caspian Sea? The answer to this question deserves not a tick in the appropriate box, but a separate serious conversation.

Because millions of years ago the Volga flowed not into the Caspian, but into the Sea of Azov, the geography of the Earth was different. And the question from a textbook turns into an interesting problem. To solve it, it is precisely the understanding that is required, which without reading and education impossible to achieve.

Feelings instead of minds

And our ability to comprehend all this and to live intelligently in this technical and informational environment lags behind these rates. The world is now experiencing a very deep crisis in the sphere of culture. So the situation in our country is quite typical for the rest of the world - in America and in England they also read little.

And such a large literature, which existed in the world 30-40 years ago, is no longer there today. Now the rulers of the minds in general are very difficult to find. Perhaps because no one needs minds - they need sensations.

Money is not the purpose of the existence of society, but only a means to achieve certain goals. You can have an army whose soldiers will fight valiantly without demanding remuneration, because they believe in the ideals of the state.

And you can have mercenaries in the service, who will kill both their own and others with equal pleasure for the same money. But these will be different armies!

And in science, breakthroughs are made not for money, but for interest. Such is the curiosity of the cat! And it's the same with big art. Masterpieces are not born for money. If everything is subordinated to money, then everything will remain money, they will not turn into a masterpiece or a discovery.

The great masters worked on the orders of the Church, a great tradition illuminated all this. Today, people go to Church much less, and television gives a generalized picture of life. But no great tradition there is no art here. You won't find anything there but massacre and shooting.

Television is engaged in the decomposition of people's consciousness. In my opinion, this is a criminal organization subordinated to anti-social interests.

Only one call comes from the screen: “Get rich by any means - theft, violence, deceit!”

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Expert comment

"Jumpers" forgot how to think?

First, at school, teachers are still chasing high scores. reading speed.

But because of this, the reading skill itself, its quality, is poorly formed among students, - says Tatyana Filippova, a leading researcher at the Institute of Developmental Physiology of the Russian Academy of Education. - As a result, the child, reading in a minute due number words, does not understand the essence of what is read, cannot retell the text.

And when a person does not know how to do something, he does not want to do it of his own free will. Pupils of grades 3-4 sometimes come to our Center for Diagnostics of the Development of Children and Adolescents, who read by syllables.

It is naive to expect that these children will spend their free time reading a book. Secondly, if 5-6 years ago computers were mostly used by students and Adults, then already two years ago, as our research shows, elementary school students “hung up” at the monitors. In addition, the parents themselves do not accustom the child to books.

Only 10% of parents regularly read to preschoolers, and only 0.2% of dads and moms read to schoolchildren! Many people think: once you have learned to read at least in syllables, read on yourself. But this is a delusion.

The task of parents is to make reading a necessity, as urgent as brushing your teeth or washing your face. Pick up a child interesting books, help him in his choice, read aloud, even if he is already 10-12 years old.

Not the last role in the fact that we read less and less, according to experts, is played by television. Specifically, a huge number of TV channels and ... a remote control.

For those who prefer to watch TV, "jumping" from channel to channel, in the West they even came up with a special term - "zapping". In total, about 47% of those watching TV are recruited with such "jumpers".

With constant switching from channel to channel, the picture perceived by the viewer turns out to be composed of fragments of programs running in parallel on different channels.

The viewer seems to "mount" his own transmission from pieces of heterogeneous video material. Add to this the constant breaks for commercials, series in which one story is sometimes "chopped" into several hundred small pieces, and you can start watching it from almost anywhere.

“As a result, we have the following,” says Daniil Dondurei, sociologist, editor-in-chief of the Art of Cinema magazine. - Over the past couple of years, there has been a trend: schoolchildren are losing the ability to follow the plot and the actions of the characters.

They practically lost the skills of retelling the text they read - elementary, not to mention such complex things as "Anna Karenina", for example.

And with the introduction of digital television in the country (and, as a result, an increase in the number of channels), such phenomena will only increase.”

Write your opinion below in the comments. Let's discuss.

Computers and TV, gadgets killed books. Now the Internet is killing big movies, then it will kill the TV. The time for books has passed. Need scripts.

As the time of poetry passed - it was killed by pop music - people always need to rest their souls and tear the button accordion and yell - "frost-frost". It's easier with music than reading - there are letters, you need to scribble - and a musical addition to poetry and fun - it will be pop music. "Don't let your soul be lazy" (c) is about poetry;

2) THERE ARE NO TALENTS OF THE AGE. There are no new poems related to the reader (for his soul), there are aesthete readers - well-read, very educated or closed, there is a shirt-guys-girls - even at 20 years old, even at 50 there are simpletons - to each his own poems.

Yes, by 2015 a lot has been written - but times are changing the abyss of need - therefore I do not agree with people who say that all books have been written. There will always be writers. Each time has its own books;

3) NO FREE PERSONAL TIME. There is no time for humanity, for a person in the 21st century. Life is very active, people often do not have time to eat and sleep;

4) FATIGUE. People have lost the desire to create and perceive new things. And to read it to create IMHO. They just became an appendage to a certain machine system - a promising civilization of gadgets. Reading books is creating. The world is full of information. People don't know where to go from it. The desire to read will not return until they have at least an hour a day for themselves, the desire to experience emotions, empathize has disappeared, everything is surrogates everywhere - food, feelings, thoughts - it would be faster to go through this in a day and get away from it faster and, what is important, burnout shower, chronic fatigue syndrome. It's easier to drink or go fishing or sleep watching TV. Fatigue.

5) FALL IN THE LEVEL OF TEACHING. General decline in the level of culture and pedagogy. Children should be taught to read from an early age.

The generation that does not read Chekhov, Turgenev, or Jules Verne will grow up cruel and cynical. But in vain.

Their results are such that at least two ministries - culture and education - need to press all the "alarm buttons" and convene emergency meetings of the Cabinet of Ministers. Because, according to VTsIOM polls, 35% of Russians DO NOT READ BOOKS AT ALL! But Russia, according to the speeches of the president and prime minister, has taken the path to innovative development. But what kind of innovations, scientific breakthroughs, the development of nanotechnologies, etc., can we talk about if more than a third of the country's population has never picked up a book in a year? None, not even a failed detective! AiF decided to find out why Russia, once the most reading country in the world, has stopped reading and how this threatens society.

Sergey Kapitsa: "Russia is being turned into a country of fools"
The VTsIOM data show that we have finally come to what we have been striving for all these 15 years - we have raised a country of idiots. If Russia continues to move along the same course, then in another ten years there will be no one left who today at least occasionally picks up a book. And we will get a country that will be easier to rule, from which it will be easier to suck out natural resources. But this country has no future! These are the words I said five years ago at a government meeting. Time passes, and no one even tries to understand and stop the processes that lead to the degradation of the nation.

We have a complete gap between words and deeds. Everyone talks about innovation, but nothing is being done to make these slogans come true. And explanations “I work so hard. When should I read again?" cannot serve as an apology. Believe me, our generation worked no less, but there was always time for reading. And labor productivity in society a few decades ago was higher than it is now. Today, almost half of the able-bodied youth work in security organizations! It turns out that all these young guys are stupid, narrow-minded people who can only beat their faces?

Where does the Volga flow?

You ask why a person should read at all. Again, I will give an example: the organisms of humans and monkeys are very close in all their characteristics. But monkeys don't read, but humans read books. Culture and reason - that's the main difference between man and monkey. And the mind is based on the exchange of information and language. And the greatest tool for exchanging information is the book. Previously, starting from the time of Homer, there was an oral tradition: people sat and listened to the elders, who in artistic form, through the legends and legends of past eras, passed on the experience and knowledge accumulated by the generation. Then came writing, and with it, reading. The tradition of oral storytelling has died out, and now the tradition of reading is also dying out. Take it somehow and, at least for the sake of curiosity, leaf through the correspondence of the greats. The epistolary heritage of Darwin, which is now being published, is 15 thousand letters. The correspondence of Leo Tolstoy also occupies more than one volume. And what will remain after the current generation? Will their text messages be published as a warning to posterity?

I have long proposed changing the admission criteria for higher education. No exams are needed - let the applicant write a five-page essay explaining why he wants to enter a particular faculty. The ability to correctly express one's thoughts, the essence of the problem demonstrates the intellectual baggage of a person, the level of his culture, the degree of development of consciousness. And the USE, which is used today, cannot give an objective picture of a student's knowledge. It is built only on knowledge or ignorance of the facts. But facts are not everything! Does the Volga flow into the Caspian Sea? The answer to this question deserves not a tick in the appropriate box, but a separate serious conversation. Because millions of years ago the Volga flowed not into the Caspian, but into the Sea of Azov, the geography of the Earth was different. And the question from a textbook turns into an interesting problem. To solve it, just something is required understanding, which is impossible to achieve without reading and education.

Feelings instead of minds

The question of losing interest in reading is the question of what is happening to people now. We have reached a very difficult moment in the development of mankind as a whole. The pace of technological development today is very high. And our ability to comprehend all this and to live intelligently in this technical and informational environment lags behind these rates. The world is now experiencing a very deep crisis in the sphere of culture. So the situation in our country is quite typical for the rest of the world - in America and in England they also read little. And such a large literature, which existed in the world 30-40 years ago, is no longer there today. Now the rulers of the minds in general are very difficult to find. Perhaps because no one needs minds - they need sensations.

Today we do not need to change our attitude to reading, but to radically change our attitude to culture as a whole. The Ministry of Culture should become the most important of all ministries. And the primary task is to stop subordinating the culture of commerce. Money is not the purpose of the existence of society, but only a means to achieve certain goals. You can have an army whose soldiers will fight valiantly without demanding remuneration, because they believe in the ideals of the state. And you can have mercenaries in the service, who will kill both their own and others with equal pleasure for the same money. But these will be different armies! And in science, breakthroughs are made not for money, but for interest. Such is the curiosity of the cat! And it's the same with big art. Masterpieces are not born for money. If everything is subordinated to money, then everything will remain money, they will not turn into a masterpiece or a discovery.

In order for children to start reading again, an appropriate cultural environment must develop in the country. What defines culture today? Once upon a time, the Church set the tone. On the day off people went to the temple and instead of watching TV they looked at frescoes, icons, stained-glass windows - at an illustration of life in images. The great masters worked on the orders of the Church, a great tradition illuminated all this. Today, people go to Church much less, and television gives a generalized picture of life. But there is no great tradition, no art here. You won't find anything there but massacre and shooting. Television is engaged in the decomposition of people's consciousness. In my opinion, this is a criminal organization subordinated to anti-social interests. Only one call comes from the screen: “Get rich by any means - theft, violence, deceit!”

The question of the development of culture is the question of the future of the country. The state cannot exist if it does not rely on culture. And it will not be able to strengthen its positions in the world only with money or military force. How can we attract our former republics today? Only culture! In the era of the USSR, they perfectly existed within the framework of our culture. Compare the level of development of Afghanistan and the republics of Central Asia - the difference is huge! And now all these countries have fallen out of our cultural space. And, in my opinion, the most important task now is to return them to this space again. When the British Empire collapsed, culture and education became the most important tools for recreating the integrity of the English-speaking world. The British opened the doors of their higher educational institutions for people from the colonies.

First of all, for those who in the future could become the manager of these new countries. I recently spoke with Estonians - they are ready to study medicine in Russia. But we charge them a lot of money for their studies. Despite the fact that they get the opportunity to study in America or England for nothing. And how can we then attract the same Estonians, so that interaction with us becomes more important for them than interaction with the West? France has a Francophonie ministry that promotes cultural policy France in the world.

In England, the British Council is considered a non-governmental organization, but in fact has a clear policy of disseminating English culture, and through it - the global English influence in the world. So the issues of culture today are intertwined with issues of politics and national security of the country. neglect it essential element influence is not possible. IN modern world more and more, science and art, and not resources and productive forces, determine the power and future of the country.