Read to live well

I don't know if I am more saddened by the results of the latest PISA report or by the fact that we have definitively left behind the famous name with which it was once christened by Joana Maria Camps, Minister of Education in the time of José Ramón Bauzá. Be that as it may, and jokes aside, it seems that our children and young people are well and truly 'trampled', if we compare our local results with the European average in areas such as reading, mathematics, and science.As a writer and translator, but above all as a person who could never conceive of themselves if it were not through the conversation with others and the world that is reading, I am particularly concerned that the report points out that the new generations have no problem reading short paragraphs, but that they find significant difficulties when they have to understand and process complex or longer texts. That is to say, they 'can' read, but they do not 'know' how to read properly, plain and simple.Given this, I think it is important not to forget that reading can be great entertainment, but also many other things. Reading is an essential competence to live in the world in which we live: actions as basic as understanding well and signing a contract, following political current events and the main social debates, or defending one's own rights with complex and at the same time forceful arguments are difficult to imagine without having a minimum background in reading and writing. Because reading is as much like understanding as writing is like thinking, like formulating, and when we know how to do both things well, we have more tools to inhabit the world in a dignified and more conscious way.And to do so, moreover, throughout life. Often, when we speak of literacy, we think mainly of those years in which people can read for themselves and can share it with others, but numerous studies point out that reading (or having things read aloud to us, that is, being spoken to) is also essential in the so-called golden thousand days. These are those first three years in which a baby's brain has the most plasticity, in which it develops the most, in which the stories we are told, the lap songs we hear, the vocabulary that surrounds us, like a most flavorful broth, begin to make us who we are. From there to autonomous reading, of course, and from that to socialization and reading clubs for young people and adults. Passing, also, through the importance of the accompanying role that reading can have in the final stages of life, whether to combat unwanted loneliness (a chronic disease of the present) or to accompany a grieving process.Making citizens into readers means fostering their freedom in the future as well. That they will have more tools for critical thinking at their disposal, that they will better process complexity, and that, in an increasingly convulsive context, they will know how to find or seek peace, to pause, to reflect.We would be wrong if, as a society, we did not make it a priority: to live well, one must return to books.