Compare and contrast
“If children want to read comic books, that’s their prerogative,” Diane Ravitch, a professor at New York University and a former U.S. assistant secretary of education, said in an e-mail. “But they are not good ‘tools’ for teaching reading.”
Comics use limited and superficial vocabulary, and they fail to teach children to read and think at the same time, she said.
From Peter Zuckerman’s article on The Comics Project in The Oregonian.
Except for our text books, we’re not aiming for didactic work or we’re not trying to say promote literacy or those kinds of things, but some books really serve those purposes well. It’s funny because Robot Dreams, which is wordless and was just recently for Oprah’s kid list (that’s a nice piece of news for us)–that book, even though it’s very simple and wordless–just images–is such rich storytelling that it’s serving all different purposes. And there are some college teachers that have used it in storytelling and screenwriting classes, and we have young classes that are using it–inviting the young readers to become participants–narrate the story. That’s interesting. There are other things happening with sometimes surprising titles that find their way into classrooms.
First Second publisher Mark Siegel, in an interview by ICv2.
It’s twits with no imagination like that woman that keeps our education system in the dumpster.
I’m surprised. Ravitch is usually on the money when it comes to education. … and it contradicts what Kylene Beers says in her book – When Kids Can’t Read. What Teachers Can Do (p. 197) that comic books use 53 rare words for 1,000 words used second only to scientific papers! And how many of us read scientific papers on a day to day basis?
Considering that Bishop Desmond Tutu credited reading comics with his learning English (and several other similar stories recounted by Jim Trelease in The Read-Aloud Handbook), I would have to say that Ravitch is wrong. Also, comics don’t necessarily have a shallow vocabulary; I think there are a number of us who learned some scientific terms and expanded our vocabulary simply by reading DC and Marvel superhero comics. Of course, we also learned some strange oaths, such as those spouted by Thor and Dr. Strange …
It’s somewhat puzzling to me why someone would claim that comics fail to teach kids to read and think at the sime time. Isn’t thinking required for reading?
Statements like this reveal prejudices that are not backed by the facts or common sense.