If
You Teach a Child to Read
 In
his book, A Touch of Wonder, Arthur Gordon writes of meeting a
schoolteacher on a beach in Georgia. When Gordon, then a boy, asked the
stranger what he did for a living, the man told him, "In the school catalog
they call it English, ... but i like to think of it as a course in magic
- in the mystery and magic of words. Are you fond of words?"
As a lover of books, and as one who makes his living with "little
marks on bits of paper," i can think of few blessings as rich as "the
mystery and magic of words." And i value greatly those who teach us to
read.
 In
the fall of '98, i was invited by Dan Lomax, one of my heroes who teaches
second graders at the Downtown Elementary Magnet School in Columbus, Georgia,
to sing for a gathering of the Columbus Literacy Society. This song was
written for that occasion.
Our tele-visual world seems, if unintentionally, to draw us away
from the experience of books. A pity. For eight or ten years, during the
80's, i went without a television, which helped open up the world of words
for me, both as reader and as writer. … When i lived in Edinburgh as a
student from late 1990 through early 1992, daily life included hours of
reading books and discussing them with others who were also students at
the university there. Few things, for my tastes, compare to the simple,
inexpensive, rewarding experience of a great book, a comfortable chair,
and a good cup of coffee. Through that employment of our imagination,
we travel to far away places, we meet fascinating people ("a dead man
out of a book can be almost a member of one's family circle," says Lewis),
we hear the words of God and befriend wise teachers. We receive the road
map for navigating our ways through life and hopefully, in the process,
become "interested and interesting." The person who reads "has lived in
many times (vicariously) and is therefore in some degree immune from the
great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone
of his own age." (Lewis) Most importantly, we learn of Christ's life,
His words, His rescue of the world, His offer of purposeful and eternal
life.
Do we read?
"It matters a great deal that your book-food be strong meat. We are
what we think about. Think about trivial or weak things, and you lose
fiber and become flabby in spirit." (Amy Carmichael)
"The test of literature, i suppose, is whether we ourselves live more
intensely for the reading of it." (Elizabeth Drew) What do you read?
If you teach a child to read…
If you teach a child to read
You've handed him an envelope
And inside there's a ticket to all corners of the world
To tropic island, ancient cities, to icebergs and to sandy deserts
To castles and to days gone by, to
This is what you've given when you teach a child to read
If you teach a child to read
You've granted them an interview
A time to talk with people who have somehow shaped the world
To Socrates and Martin Luther, Clara Barton and Michael Jordan
You can introduce them if you please
This is what you've given when you teach a child to read
Little marks on bits of paper,
keys that open treasure chests
Signs that point us to the truth,
and help us all to be our best
If you teach a child to read
You've handed them some candlelight
a way to travel safely in the way they ought to go
A sense of time a sense of place, the way of Love, the way of Grace
The way to find the life that's life indeed
That is what you've given when you teach a child to read
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