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Sunday Reading: The Power of One

Sundays? Literature, Fiction, Fact, and Words.

I spent the first ten minutes of writing this post trying to put together a clever phrase to explain why I was reading a book that is a couple decades old, neither new and fresh nor a bonafied classic, but I deleted those original attempts and decided to just write it simply: I was reading a book written in the 1980’s for no other reason than it was there. And the oddly surprising thing is that not only is did that story happen to be a story about a kid growing up in the springtime of Apartheid in South Africa, but it turned out to be a great story about critical thinking. In fact, The Power of One, by Bryce Courtney turned out to be a story built upon a vein of unlabeled skepticism.

I suppose I could turn this into a book review (aka, a book report) and bore readers numb with a shallow analysis of a tome of a novel with so many layers, twists, turns, and tear-jerking moments (sniff) my humble overview would barely begin to do it justice. But instead, I thought I would comment on the simple vein of critical thinking that runs through the self-revealing narrative of the main character’s thoughts. The main character, a young boy blossoming from the beginning of the novel as a young child barely cognizant of his own self to an intelligent free-thinking young adult shaping the (mis)perceptions of the world around him, endures trials that would reduce many of us to conformity. Instead we are told the story of racism, fear, hate, war, violence, and growing up in the middle of it all facing the pressures to follow the norm — pressures to segregate, pressures to believe, pressures to surrender — the boy as narrator telling the story as if coolly reflecting on a detailed memory. His analysis of what he thought, why he thought, and the matter-of-fact analysis of his youth always bleeds through the drama of the underlying action. His careful explanation of the logic and reasoning, backed by the evidence of his own strong memory and balanced by the education received from a fortunate collection of informal instructors, benefactors, and detractors, is methodically outlined from the perspective of his clever innocence. For the parent of any young child, the lessons burdened upon this young protagonist are neither ones we would wish upon any son or daughter, nor any lessons we could hope to replicate — instead representing a dark ideal for the scarring of survival tool of critical thought upon a young mind, and in the process offering a bleak commentary on the difficulty of such an education and also the benefits.

I struggle when I start wondering what kinds of books either kid or adults should read to build their critical thinking skills. Of course, the simple answer is “everything.” I can’t in good faith recommend the absence of knowledge under any circumstance. (Knowledge is indeed power, after all.) So, this is not so much a recommendation, as an surprised response to a piece of literature that — had I known it was so thoroughly relevant to the subject matter of this blog — I would have read years ago. And I now have a dog-eared paperback on my bookshelf if you’d like to stop by and pick it up.

The SkepDad Blog is meant to casually reflect on questions surrounding parenting and raising kids to become critical thinkers by asking questions and examining parenting ideas with a skeptical eye for facts and science. Each article is one dad's personal opinion, backed (where relevant) by literature and published research, or otherwise based on personal experiences and insights. SkepDad welcomes balanced discussion, comments, and ideas.

October 26, 2008 by Brad
Filed as: Skeptical Mindsets

Popularity: 10%

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Tags: books, critical thinking, literature, reading, sunday reading