Whatever the reason, the upturn looks feeble, for all a larger increase in the NSSE numbers requires is that students add another book or two every 12 months. The school year lasts only 30 weeks, leaving 22 weeks to plow through some trashy novels at the beach or pick up a popular text or two related to their studies,
Freakonomics
for econ majors, for instance. Coursework should inspire more intellectual probing. It won’t hurt their chemistry grades, and outside books might even raise their scores on the GMAT and the LSAT, which have reading-comprehension sections. Young Americans have everything to gain from reading, more civic and historical knowledge, familiarity with current events and government actions, a larger vocabulary, better writing skills, eloquence, inexpensive recreation, and contact with great thoughts and expressions of the past. And yet even in the intellectual havens of our universities, too many of them shield themselves from the very activity that best draws them out of the high school mindset.
Compare their attitude with that of young Frederick Douglass, a slave in Baltimore whose mistress started to teach him the ABCs until her husband found out and forbade it. Years later, Douglass remembered his master’s words as brutal truth: “Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world,” he overhears him say. “Now if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.” Douglass listened closely and realized well the liberating power of written words (and why Southern states made teaching slaves to read illegal) . “Though conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher,” he pledged in his autobiography, “I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read.”
Or that of John Stuart Mill, the great Victorian liberal intellectual. Born in 1806, Mill was a prodigy, learning Greek starting at age three and algebra at age eight, and by his late teens he’d acquired expert knowledge of logic, economics, and history. But a crushing depression hit him soon after, “the dry heavy dejection of the melancholy winter of 1826,” he called it in his
Autobiography
(1873). Life seemed vapid and pointless, and the promise of renown failed to cheer him. As months passed and despondency deepened, one unexpected encounter rescued him: “my reading of Wordsworth for the first time (in the autumn of 1828).” The poems presented scenes of rural beauty and moments of pious sympathy, bringing Mill into “the common feelings and common destiny of human beings.” His depression lifted, and forever after Mill honored the
Lyrical Ballads
as “a medicine for my state of mind.”
Or that of Walt Whitman, for years a journeyman printer and hack writer in Brooklyn until Ralph Waldo Emerson’s speeches and essays set him on a pioneering ascent toward
Leaves of Grass
in 1855. “I was simmering, simmering, simmering,” he divulged a few years later. “Emerson brought me to a boil.”
Or W. E. B. Du Bois, born in 1868, who found solace from living in a Jim Crow nightmare in the imaginary worlds of books. “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not,” he wrote in 1902. “Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of Evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension.”
Their testimony sets the bibliophobia of today’s youth into merciless relief. Books carried them out of torment and torpor, and the readings transformed them into something more and better than they were before. Adolescents today have the same feelings and experiences—depression, abuse, uncertainty—and they don’t have to be geniuses like Mill and Du Bois to profit from books. And the books don’t have to be classics, either. Given the turn of his peers away from reading, and the power of peer pressure, a 17-year-old boy in suburbia who likes the mall, plays b-ball every afternoon, and carts an iPod at all times, but reserves an hour at night for a number in the Conan series deserves praise. Douglass and other greats who attributed their growth to reading don’t shame the current generation because of their personal brilliance or their literary choices, but simply because of their acute appreciation of the written word.
An average teenager with the same devotion will receive the same benefits, if to lesser degrees. His ego is shaky, and the ordinary stuff of youth culture plays on his doubts with puerile dramas, verbal clichés, and screen psychodelia. With
MySpace, YouTube,
teen blogs, and Xbox added to Tupac and Britney,
Titanic
and
Idol,
the Internet doubles the deluge of images and sounds from movies, TV, and radio. Lengthy exposure to finer things is the best education in taste, and it’s hard to sustain it when the stuff of pop culture descends so persistently on leisure time. There is no better reprieve from the bombardment than reading a book, popular literature as well as the classics. Books afford young readers a place to slow down and reflect, to find role models, to observe their own turbulent feelings well expressed, or to discover moral convictions missing from their real situations. Habitual readers acquire a better sense of plot and character, an eye for the structure of arguments, and an ear for style, over time recognizing the aesthetic vision of adolescent fare as, precisely, adolescent.
The survey data show that young Americans increasingly go the other way, far from books and into the maelstrom of youth amusements. In the Pew Research Center’s 2006 report on newspaper readership, only 39 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds said they “enjoy reading a lot,” far less than the national average of 53 percent, and a harbinger of worse numbers to come. A small core of teens and young adults still read avidly, but the number who read now and then is dwindling. The biggest loss in the
Reading at Risk
study took place in the “light” reader category (one to five works per year), which fell at a faster rate than did the rates of people who read numerous books per year. The consequences of the shift extend much further than they appear to at first glance. This is because of the cumulative, developmental nature of reading, a cognitive benefit that says that the more you read, the more you can read. Reading researchers call it the “Matthew Effect,” in which those who acquire reading skills in childhood read and learn later in life at a faster pace than those who do not. They have a larger vocabulary, which means that they don’t stumble with more difficult texts, and they recognize better the pacing of stories and the form of arguments, an aptitude that doesn’t develop as effectively through other media. It’s like exercising. Go to the gym three times a week and the sessions are invigorating. Go to the gym three times a month and they’re painful. As the occasions of reading diminish, reading becomes a harder task. A sinister corollary to the cognitive benefit applies: the more you don’t read, the more you can’t read.
SO WHAT? “Who Cares If Johnny Can’t Read? The value of books is overstated.” That’s the title and subtitle of an essay in
Slate
by Larissa MacFarquhar, now a “profiles” writer with
The New Yorker.
It appeared 11 years ago, in 1997, but the sentiment pops up often, strangely enough in literary and education circles. The surveys I’ve invoked usually produce a chorus of newspaper stories and public commentary on the descent of popular culture into ever coarser and more idiotic enjoyments, and they identify a-literacy as a signal trait of heedless youth. Just as predictably, however, comes a small counterresponse as academics and the more hip, youngish intellectuals pooh-pooh the alarm and yield to, or even embrace, the very advents that worriers decry. I witnessed one example at a meeting of literary scholars in Boulder in 2004 after I presented the findings of
Reading at Risk.
With my dozen PowerPoint charts lined up and commentary completed, a distinguished professor of Renaissance literature on the panel had heard enough. “Look, I don’t care if everybody stops reading literature,” she blurted. “Yeah, it’s my bread and butter, but cultures change. People do different things.” What to say about a hypereducated, highly paid teacher, a steward of literary tradition entrusted to impart the value of literature to students, who shows so little regard for her field? I can’t imagine a mathematician saying the same thing about math, or a biologist about biology, yet, sad to say, scholars, journalists, and other guardians of culture accept the deterioration of their province without much regret.
A 2005 editorial I spotted a while back in the
Los Angeles Times
was merrily blatant. It first asserted how much kids learn from video games, which unite play with information. Books and classrooms, on the other hand, divide learning and joy in two. Hence, the
Times
went on, no wonder boys who play Microsoft’s “Age of Empires II” know more about the Crusades than do kids in history class. The title of the editorial offered a new rule for parents to pass to their children—“Put That Book Down!”—as if it were a twenty-first -century counterpart to Ben Franklin’s lessons (“Early to bed and early to rise . . .”). It concluded: “Tell our children to stop fooling around and go play their Xbox for a couple of hours? It affronts our cherished notions of academic excellence. Get over it.” What to say about a flagship daily that resorts to smug demotions of bookishness?
MacFarquhar adopts the same impatient, dismissive tone. The essay says nothing insightful about the issue, but it illustrates well this curious tendency of educators and intellectuals to downplay evidence of mental stagnation in America. “Among the truisms that make up the eschatology of American cultural decline,” she begins, “one of the most banal is the assumption that Americans don’t read.” She proceeds to mock “fears of cultural apocalypse,” and observes, “The sentimentalization of books gets especially ripe when reading is compared with its supposed rivals: television and cyberspace.” The characterization is plain. People who worry about reading declines and book culture are just overwrought handwringers, alarmists disposed to neurotic visions of the end. MacFarquhar supports the send-up with data from Gallup polls in the 1950s showing lower reading rates than today, along with the fact that five times as many titles were published in 1981 as were published in 1950. In assessing the state of our culture, she concludes, “Reading
per se
is not the issue.”
The evidence supposedly puts to rest a cultural panic, shifting the issue from the facts of the matter to the ideology of the alarmists. In truth, however, the Gallup reading polls MacFarquhar cites produced erratic results from year to year, indicating flaws in the design, and the number of titles published each year means a lot less than the number of units sold. From 2003 to 2004, for instance, the number of book titles published rose 14 percent, but according to the Book Industry Study Group, the number of books sold dropped by nearly 44 million. A better survey than the Gallup polls appeared in 1946, commissioned by the Book Manufacturers’ Institute and drawing from a sample of 4,000 respondents. Published as
People and Books: A Study of Reading and Book-Buying Habits
by Henry C. Clink and Harry Arthur Hopf, it reported fully 71 percent of adults reading a book in the preceding year, the Bible being the most popular (
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,
by Betty Smith, ranked third, Richard Wright’s
Black Boy
twelfth). Broken down by age, reading rates followed a consistent pattern, this time with the youngest ages tallying the highest percentage. Remarkably, 15- to 19-year-olds came in at 92 percent reading a book in the previous year, and 20- to 29-year-olds at 81 percent. The rates progressively fell among each older group, with 60 and over bottoming out at 56 percent. The survey transpired, of course, just before the dawn of television.
But MacFarquhar cares too much about tweaking the bibliophiles for their “maudlin paeans to books” to ponder objectively the extent and implications of reading declines. She and other anti-alarmists cite a statistic mainly to discredit the other side, not to clarify the issue. The central question—“Have reading rates really declined, and if so does the trend portend a decline in intelligence or just a normal shift of popular habits?”—acquires in their hands a culture wars angle. Conservatives and reactionaries fear the disappearance of books as a harbinger of more vulgarity and corruption, while progressives and libertarians let such changes slide and recast the fears as moralistic blather. That’s the setup, and beneath it lie other, familiar tensions over family values, public schooling, and childrearing.
A polemical edge in a
Slate
column can be diverting, of course, but the antagonistic spirit stretches to the central powers in education as well. One typical example appeared in a 2005 column in the
Council Chronicle
by President Randy Bomer of the National Council of Teachers of English (membership: 60,000+). The springboard for Bomer’s commentary was a curricular reform called the American Diploma Project, a public-private initiative geared to improving the college- and workplace-readiness of high school graduates. In 2004, the Project developed a new set of benchmarks for English language arts, guidelines that included injunctions such as, “The high school graduate can synthesize information from multiple informational and technical sources,” and “The high school graduate can analyze the setting, plot, theme, characterization, and narration of classic and contemporary short stories and novels.” The designers strove for range and rigor, including grammar, oral presentation, literature, “informational text,” mixed media, technical writing, and a host of other language skills and genres in their vision of high school instruction.