Читать книгу Narcosis - Francisco Garófalo - Страница 6

I learnt. I began to know a lot. I learnt things by myself. Nobody taught me. I was a little boy who learnt day by day and I spent all day watching television since that was the only way for me to amuse myself and discover the world at the same time. I learnt, or maybe I didn’t.

What can television teach us? Perhaps quite a lot. Mostly bad things, depending on what we choose to watch. And what does a little boy of five choose to watch? Cartoons which are either violent or where the main characters are two talking animals. It’s entertainment, or at least that’s what they tell us.

But the truth is you end up acting like them and you get caught up in a vicious circle of stupidity and nastiness. The soaps, what do they teach you? The songs that make no sense? From that I learnt.

I didn’t know how to select television channels. Action films fascinated me. Their cleverness for killing and the different ways of fighting. I ended up absorbed in pornographic films that I found in the drawer of my aunt’s dresser. An apparently moral woman. How could I find pornography in her drawer? There is seemingly no limit to people’s falseness. They put on a mask so that they are not exposed.

I filled my head with rubbish. It was what the world offered me at the time and I took full advantage. And I took in everything I looked at, everything I heard, everything I could cram into my brain. If you ask me today, I admit that it was the worst way to learn. Perhaps I should have pored over books but what do texts matter to a little boy? I wouldn’t even have understood the links between several meaningless chapters because I didn’t have the education to decipher the hidden message. I didn’t even have anyone to explain it to me.

My cousins learnt differently to me. They had parents who taught them things and cared about their education. They had set times for watching television. To see their favourite programmes, first they had to study and do their homework, then their parents gave them advice on this or that over an afternoon snack before they got their prize, time in front of the television. Every night at bedtime, their parents read them fables with morals so that they learnt good things and would grow up to become successful professionals. However, false words never bear fruit.

You can’t teach by saying one thing and doing the opposite. The best way to teach is by example. We should talk less and do what we say. Imposing is not the way. Encouragement is better.

If you want your child to take an interest in reading, let them see you reading. If you don’t want them to lie, don’t lie yourself. That is how to educate. You can’t educate if you don’t set an example. You can’t harvest healthy fruit if you sow weeds. You can’t do it, however much you may want to.