I haven't read a book in a while, I might just buy one. Which one would you recommend? Don't just buy the one that's the most expensive... One of the young men, I'd say he's in his early XNUMXs, said something like that, whom I recently ran into near the stand of one of the publishers at the biggest book fair here.
He was wearing a boyfriend, like his other cronies, a sweatshirt with long sleeves called a hoodie. On the back side, the name and logo of a domestic - even an international one! - private higher education university institutions whose name ambitiously winks at the ideals of freedom, independence, independence. With posture, clothing style, gags, quasi-boyish grins - performance in general - in that scene, as a group, they somewhat resembled a version of American college boys, a classic motif that has been abundantly used in Hollywood films for decades, and before that appeared in literature.
Let's now put aside the easily discernible primary motivation of the aforementioned statement from the beginning of the note. Namely, it was in the function of an innocent flirtation, an attempt to charm and an introductory flirtation with girls who were generationally close to him, who worked at the book stand in question. We don't even get into the value assessment of how original, skillful or clumsy such "intrusion" was. For the purposes of this column, it is not even important. It is more interesting for us to ask ourselves how and why the motive of not reading books, this week's unnamed hero of this column served as an entry point with which he started the girl working at the stand?
Okay, the context is like that, everything is clear, the fair is a book, so the first associations are understandably drawn to the practice of reading and books. But the boy is obviously also a student. Now, maybe I'm dancing dangerously on the edge. Am I in danger of naively falling into a trap if I affirm from a professional point of view that books and reading could, and should, continue to be very important components of education in the somewhat advanced 21st century?
Because if that were really the case, then the stated statement of one student - even if he was from one of the nonsensical private schools here whose primary and exclusive motive is profit, and "education" is only a shortcut to it - would be not only bad a guy's prank of shooting girls, but also an unconscious manifestation of his own stupidity. Sound harsh and conservative? Do you know Prof. Hromadžić, in which time and in what kind of world do you live? Have you heard about the digital age and the future with artificial intelligence? What about you, who still reads classic, analogue books from that generation and who has the right to demand that from them?
Yes, I know about all that, but I remember very well that the nonsense like the one described irritated me thirty+ years ago, in the prehistory of the pre-internet era, when I was in the age of the hero of this story, just as it still irritates me today. No, it is not generational, but rather a matter of values at stake.
Bonus video:
