Beyond the apex of reading

In a recent Room For Debate post, Maryanne Wolf expresses concern that e-books--and digital reading technologies in general--could have detrimental effects on a child's cognitive ability:

I have no doubt that the digital immersion of our children will provide a rich life of entertainment and information and knowledge. My concern is that they will not learn, with their passive immersion, the joy and the effort of the third life, of thinking one’s own thoughts and going beyond what is given. Let us bring our best thought and research to preserving what is most precious about the present reading brain as we add the new capacities of its next iteration.

The "third life" Wolf refers to is the set of mental processes that occur in our minds milliseconds after reading text, including imagination, contextual digestion, critical analysis, and scores of other important cognitive skills. Or as Wolf puts it--and I love this term--the "apex of reading."

There's undoubtedly an immense amount of truth to what Wolf says here, and more research into electronic reading/learning will be critical. But I've always been on the side of practice driving theory, and now, more than ever, we need to simply push kids to read. We need to throw every text we have at them--books, Kindles, blogs, massive chunks of online text and code--because the real key to the upcoming generation's cognitive development is going to be the ability to harness multiple texts from multiple mediums. We need to teach kids how to squeeze every drop they can out of every little bit of information and how to construct broader pictures and ideas from these little bits. Reading will always be that gateway to the "third life," no matter what the medium. If we can just instill that one value in students, then I'm confident the rest will take care of itself.