Flatly unimpressed, Bomer denounces the results straight off: “I was struck by their narrowness and smallness.” The drafters of the benchmarks responded to two current problems—one, the excessive number of high school graduates entering the workplace with atrocious reading and writing skills, and two, the excessive number of entering freshmen who end up in remedial courses. I participated in the discussions, and we observed then, and could gather still more now, voluminous complaints from professors and employers about poor literacy levels in the young adults entering their classrooms and workplaces. For example, a 2006 survey of college professors by the
Chronicle of Higher Education
found that only 6 percent of them believe that entering students are “very well prepared in writing,” and in 2005 only 51 percent of high school graduates who took the ACT test met the college-readiness benchmark in reading, and only 21 percent in all four subjects (math, science, English, reading). Even in the manufacturing sector, employers say that literacy skills are critical, and in short supply. In 2001, members of the National Association of Manufacturers ranked “poor reading/writing skills” the #2 deficiency among current employees, and in 2005 38 percent of them agreed that high school produces workers with inadequate “reading and comprehension” skills.
As for remedial classes in college, the National Center for Education Statistics estimated that in 2004, 20 percent of freshmen students end up in remedial reading courses and 23 percent in remedial writing courses. In August 2006, the Alliance for Excellent Education estimated that two-year colleges spend $1.4 billion a year improving skills that should have been acquired in high school. The economy as a whole suffers, and the Alliance calculated, “Because too many students are not learning the basic skills needed to succeed in college or work while they are in high school, the nation loses more than $3.7 billion a year.” The numbers are staggering. An April 2007 story in the
Miami Herald,
for instance, reported that at Miami Dade College and Broward Community College, four out of five entering students need remedial coursework and advising before they can even start college-level instruction. The cost to taxpayers tops $35 million annually. Less than 25 percent of enrollees earn a degree or certificate within three years (see Bierman).
But Bomer finds the benchmarks we prepared in light of those reports hopelessly out-of-date: “They describe an academic subject of English from 50 years ago, not the one that is practiced in most universities today.” He belittles the “quaintly archaic” benchmarks for sticking to work and school, rather than engaging larger “life” literacies, and that’s all he says about them. From there, in predictable steps, he turns his censure to the character of the people behind them. Absorbed in “the policing of correctness in employee prose,” he alleges, they damage the very children they claim to help: “I am struck by how mean and weak their hopes are for our students and our future society.”
Literary traditionalists might agree that the benchmarks overemphasize verbal skills suitable for the workplace and downplay humanistic learning, which includes immersion in the best literary traditions. But more Chaucer, Blake, and Woolf isn’t what Bomer has in mind. Instead, he contends that adolescents already possess an advanced and creative literacy, just not the kind that we retrograde folks at the Diploma Project acknowledge.
An ample and growing body of research shows us that adolescents are expert users of many and varied forms and technologies of literacy. Their practices are purposeful and sophisticated, and they use literacy to do the kinds of things people have always done with literacy. As most parents of adolescents know very well, kids are more likely to be expert at emerging information and communications technologies than their parents or their teachers are. They have sophisticated viewer literacies—understandings about how video, TV, and film work and vast reserves of knowledge about how what they are watching now exists in dialogue with older stories, characters, and forms.
This is an extraordinary statement by the head of English teachers across the country, people delegated to tutor children and adolescents in verbal literacy and literary aptitude, not “viewer literacy.” It recalls the student in the
Chronicle of Higher Education
symposium who cast her father as a dinosaur stuck in the library stacks, and her own generation as the digital avant-garde. To applaud young people for harboring “vast reserves of knowledge,” to judge them “sophisticated” and “expert” with information, to claim that “They are inventing new forms of literature,” as Bomer does later, is to slip into precisely the callow hubris that prompts teens to reject the certainties of their parents, and their books, too. Bomer wants to treat traditionalists as “archaic” and pessimistic scolds, and teens who love the Web and eschew books will agree. But the evidence from the knowledge and skill surveys isn’t so easy to dismiss, nor are complaints from employers and the college remediation rates. In truth, the teens Bomer exalts are drowning in their own ignorance and a-literacy, and to aggrandize the minds and skills of the kids isn’t just a rhetorical weapon to use against the alarmists. It feeds the generational consciousness that keeps kids from growing up.
BOMER’S DISCOURSE isn’t unusual, to be sure, and for decades teachers have grown weary of hearing how many students pass through their classes without acquiring the rudiments of liberal education. The recourse to “viewer literacy,” however, modifies the terms of the debate. It says that the import of books and the practice of literacy themselves have changed. No longer should we worry whether kids read enough books or not. Instead, we should recognize a new order of reading and text in the world, a newfangled cognition and knowledge. They don’t read books? Well, they read other things. They don’t know any history? Well, maybe not history recorded in books, but they know other kinds.
That’s the contention, and it echoes throughout the discussion of literacy today. Former Deputy Secretary of Education Eugene Hickok proclaims of the MTV generation, “They think differently, they act differently, they want to be engaged, they’re more engaged than ever before, their attention span is quicker, they are not inclined to sit down and spend hours quietly reading a book. They’re more inclined to be reading three or four books at one time while they multi-task on their Palm Pilots” (see Federation of American Scientists—we’ll skip over the absurdity of their reading three or four books at once). Such assertions accept digital literacy as a full-fledged intellectual practice, a mode of reading and learning a lot more exciting and promising than the old kinds. In spite of the confidence, though, there is no “ample and growing body of research” on the digital facility of adolescents, only the commonplace assertion of their techno-aptitudes. The unmistakable sign of its spread comes from the young practitioners themselves, who evoke digital catchphrases with the coolness of veteran users. Here a 20-something contributor to a
USA Today
blog on “Generation Next” pronounces one as neatly as the professionals:
Today’s young people don’t suffer from illiteracy; they just suffer from e-literacy. We can’t spell and we don’t know synonyms because there’s less need to know. What smart person would devote hours to learning words that can be accessed at the click of a button? Spell-check can spell. Shift+F7 produces synonyms. What is wrong with relying on something that is perfectly reliable? (Andrukonis)
E-literacy—that’s the new virtue, the intellectual feat of the rising generation. Alarmists and traditionalists interpret it as ignorance and a-literacy, but, the e-literacy fans retort, they only thus display their antiquarianism. In a June 2007 op-ed in the
Philadelphia Inquirer
entitled “With Prodigious Leaps, Children Move to the Technological Forefront,” President Jonathan Fanton of the MacArthur Foundation claims that “today’s digital youth are in the process of creating a new kind of literacy, which extends beyond the traditions of reading and writing into an evolving community of expression and problem-solving that is changing not only their world, but ours, as well.” Young people shirk books, maybe so, but not because they’re lazy and stupid. The twenty-first-century economy requires rapid communications, faster transfers of info, the reasoning goes, and ambitious teens don’t have time to deliberate over a volume of Robert Frost or learn five new words a day. E-literacy derives not from bibliophobia, then, but from the miraculous and evolving advent of digital technology, the Information Age and the Electronic Word. The more young adults master the practices of digital life, the better they succeed. With the
American Freshman Survey
reporting in 2005 that 71 percent of students attend college “to be able to make more money” (up from 44.6 percent in 1971), e-literacy makes a lot more sense than book learning.
The e-literacy argument proceeds everywhere, and with so many benefits from technology shoring it up, bibliophiles have lost their primary rationale. Book reading doesn’t seem to improve young people’s money and prospects, so why do it? If the national leader of English teachers commends them for their viewer know-how, why spend four hours on a Sunday afternoon digging through
Middle-march
or
Up from Slavery
? When science writer Steven Johnson appears on
The Colbert Report
and asserts that 12-year-olds who play
Civilization IV,
the second most popular game in 2005, “re-create the entire course of human economic and technological history,” the screen rises into a better and faster teacher than the textbook. Bibliophiles end up in the rearguard, bereft of cultural capital, forced to reargue the case for books.
Most of the time, they lose. To argue against screen diversions is to take on an economic and cultural juggernaut, and an even stronger force, too: the penchants of adolescents. An April 2007
Education Week
article whose header runs “Young people typically plug in to new technology far more often on their own time than in school,” neatly illustrates the attitude. “When I step out of school, I have a pretty high tech life,” a Providence, Rhode Island, high school senior tells the reporter. “When I step in school, I feel like I’m not me anymore. I have to jump into this old-fashioned thing where everything is restricted” (see Gewertz). Digital technology reflects his identity, books alienate him, teachers restrict him, and hundreds of peers echo his disquiet. Furthermore, they have a host of experts to reinforce the self-centered view, as educator and futurist Marc Prensky does just a few paragraphs later in the article. “School represents the past,” he says. “After-school is where they are training themselves for the future. The danger is that as school becomes less and less relevant, it becomes more and more of a prison.”
But however much the apologists proclaim the digital revolution and hail teens and 20-year-olds for forging ahead, they haven’t explained a critical paradox. If the young have acquired so much digital proficiency, and if digital technology exercises their intellectual faculties so well, then why haven’t knowledge and skill levels increased accordingly? As we’ve seen, wealth, cultural access, and education levels have climbed, but not intellectual outcomes. If the Information Age solicits quicker and savvier literacies, why do so many new entrants into college and work end up in remediation? Why do one-third of students who go straight to college out of high school drop out after one year (according to the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education)? If their digital talents bring the universe of knowledge into their bedrooms, why don’t they handle knowledge questions better? A 2004 study from the National Commission on Writing surveyed business leaders and found that a significant portion of them complain of serious reading and writing problems among new employees, forcing corporate America to spend approximately $3.1 billion annually on in-house literacy tutoring. “The skills of new college graduates are deplorable—across the board,” one replied. Another grumbled, “Recent graduates aren’t even aware when things are wrong.” The American Political Science Association declared in 1998 that “current levels of political knowledge, political engagement, and political enthusiasm are so low as to threaten the vitality and stability of democratic politics in the United States,” and few people would argue that the maturation of the wired generation, the “digital natives,” has improved the climate. Digital habits have mushroomed, but reading scores for teens remain flat, and measures of scientific, cultural, and civic knowledge linger at abysmal levels. Why?
CHAPTER THREE
SCREEN TIME
The Apple Store at Lenox Square is clean and bright. The portal doesn’t contain any words, just two white Apple logos set in black panels flanking the entry. In the display window to the right sit two hand-size iPods on a small stand with poster-size reproductions hanging behind them, one showing on its screen Bono singing in the spotlights, another with the cast of
The Office
seated glumly around a meeting table.
Step inside and the white walls, white lights, and ash floors rouse you from the dreary escalators, potted plants, and dull metal railings in the mall promenade. Laptop and desktop screens line the sides of the room and flash pictures of canny urban youths until someone touches the mouse and icons appear bidding customers to check email and browse the Web. Halfway back, iPods, photo printers, digital cameras, and video take over, with salespersons hovering eager to demonstrate. Two modest shelves run up the middle exhibiting games and books such as
GarageBand 3: Create and Record Music on a Mac, Final Draft
(a scriptwriting program for TV and film),
The Sims 2,
and various “Brainbuilding Games for Kids.” A bright red rug marks the youngsters’ section, where four screens rest on a low table with chairs that look like fuzzy black basketballs. Behind it rises the Genius Bar, where three clerks in black T-shirts guide clients through digital snags as others wait on benches arranged in front of a large screen on the rear wall with a video streaming nonstop.