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Engaging the youth in books

Engaging the youth in books
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Books can prove to be a useful tool to engage the youth in a constructive way. The books will not only enhance their vision about the world but will help them to learn and understand life better.
This move will help them to prove better citizens and good human beings who will contribute towards nation building and surge ahead benefitting the entire society. Interest in book was a routine during the early eighties and nineties when the digital world had not made its presence felt the way it has today.
Students, scholars and even the commoners would dedicate long hours in discussing books, their relevance and impact. All these discussions would centre on various books and what they hold in store for the civilization.
These discussions not only generated a keen interest among the youngsters but also got them attracted towards the reading culture. However, with the advent of internet and mobile phone culture, the trend has vanished.
As such the reading habit among the students community is waning fast and we as a society are to be blamed for this collectively. Students have been pushed to use social media and modern gadgetry which is killing their instincts to approach the world of knowledge through books or the printed word.
Most of the time the new generation is seen hung on to the social media and their affiliation with it has gone drastically wrong as the attachment to the modern day social media has turned addictive.
So much so that the new era students have no liking for the printed word and books and libraries that used to be the most sought after just few decades back. Right now books are on nobody’s wish list.
This sort of development cannot be turned into a routine. The society, government and other civil groups need to come forward and help in reestablishing the lost contact between the youth and the books. People need to work out on converting reading places like the libraries to places of interest, making the libraries more attractive and interactive.
Even the up gradation of the libraries and the library culture in schools has always remained a distant dream in government educational institutions. As per norms, the school education department is supposed to provide proper library facilities to students at elementary level under provisions of erstwhile Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) scheme. However, implementation of the initiative has been put on the back burner.
Though the education department receives annual grants under erstwhile RMSA scheme from Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) to equip schools with proper library facilities, but even this scheme hasn’t been implemented seriously.
More so, the library culture is yet to be set in most of the high and higher secondary schools. The lack of library facilities in the secondary and senior secondary level schools has adversely affected the reading habits of students.
Experts say that the focus of the education department has primarily remained on academics while as improving on the facilities in the library section hasn’t remained a priority.

 

 


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