Hello,
Regarding the ongoing debate concerning the reading habits (or lack of
habits) of the American public (teens in particular), a recent article from
Educational Digest (Feb., 2005) did a fine treatment of the issue. It was
condensed from "Forgetting How to Read, or Just Re-Locating It?" by Lawrence Hardy
[American School Board Journal].
The drop in literary reading is down across the board, but in the 18- to
24-year-olds bracket it now stands at 43%. In 1982 it was 60%. But lets face it,
20 years ago we did not have computers, the Internet, four TV's per household or
video games. Some feel that activities like text messaging, Internet surfing and
blogging are suitable substitutes. "People are reading fewer books. Many are not
reading books at all . . . I don't think that's a terrible thing, unless you're an
English teacher." [Philip Thompsen, speech professor at West Chester University
near Philadelphia]
Regardless of where the information comes from, our geographic literacy is
going down the same path as our literary aptitudes. A 2002 National Geographic
survey found that 56% of Americans could not find India on a map and fully 85%
could not find Iraq, Israel or Afghanistan. [You would think that maps of Iraq and
Afghanistan should show up in our dreams.]
There are two quotes from the article I would like to share for those of
you who need some ammunition in the struggle to keep placing these rectangular
objects with words into the hands of reluctant patrons in the hope that they will
crack open the cover and be able to push away the distractions of the 21st century.
The first is by children's author Philip Pullman. He argues that watching
text and images fly by on a computer screen is not that same as engaging text from
the printed page. The reader is an equal partner in the making of meaning from the
text in a book.
"We are in control of the speed process. We go at the rate we want, not
the rate someone else has decided for us. When we've finished reading, we bring
away what we ourselves and the text have made together. If we don't contribute, if
we don't take part, we get nothing. If we do, we get a world. That what I mean by
the democracy of the text, and it's why printing and publishing and libraries and
literacy and booksellers and writers and books are more necessary than ever and why
reading and democracy are not different things, not even different aspects of
something else; they are the very same thing."
The other quote is from psychologist Jane M. Healy, author of Failure to
Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children's Minds - For Better and Worse.
"Visual technologies are so seductive and habituating, that it's hard to
drag yourself away from them and do something else. [But drag ourselves away we
must]. It isn't only the capacity to read [that is lost]. It is the capacity for
the kind of logical, reflective, analytic thought that reading promotes. And if
you don't develop those skills somewhere along the way, it becomes almost
impossible to recover them as you get older.
"There are vast implications for our survival as a nation - or certainly
our survival as the culture we have known. Cultures can evolve, and they can
evolve either positively or negatively. And those that evolve negatively go down
the tubes."
Ed Nizalowski, SMS
Newark Valley High School
Newark Valley, NY
enizalowski@nvcs.stier.org
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