On Reading

I wholeheartedly agree with Shaughnessy's assertion that parents and school should provide a conducive environment for students to read more. However, reading itself can be nothing but a complete waste of your time unless it prompts you to reflect carefully and systematically, and nudges you to articulate what you have learned in writing. Think about the last time you watched a movie. Do you even recall what the movie was about? Had you discussed--better yet, wrote an essay--about it, you would have still remembered it. So, don't just read a book: think, reflect, and write something about the book in your journal. The same principle applies to the article below.

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Commentary: On Reading
Michael F. Shaughnessy Senior Columnist EdNews.org
Eastern New Mexico University

Every once in a while, an exemplary article is brought to my attention. Recently, Caleb Crain published an article in The New Yorker on " The Twilight of the Books". In this article, published on Dec 24, 2007, he discussed the decline of books and reading.

Crain first reviewed some of the salient past literature conducted by various polls and organizations over the past 50 or so years, which seems to indicate, probably quite correctly, that there has been a decline in reading. This decline is pervasive, and includes newspapers, magazines, books, and the like.

Certainly, with the advent of television, and now the explosion of movies and CD's people are turning more and more to the screen rather than to the hard cover or paper back book. Children growing up in the current zeitgeist are exposed more to the Internet than to H.G. Wells' book "The War of the Worlds". Adolescents are turning more to text messaging and e-mailing than to actually writing essays or book reports. And adults, in their stress filled lives, have little time to turn to Will and Ariel Durant, or Cervantes or Dumas.

Crain, who studied at Columbia, reviews some of the past work of Maryanne Wolf of Tufts. Wolf has hypothesized about how the computer screen and technology has affected our brains and the wiring and circuitry in it. Today, we have MRI's and other magnetic resonance imaging devices that provide a visual picture as to what is occurring in the brain as we process prose materials and text.
Certainly, those who read, succeed, and those who read well, comprehend extensively and remember and integrate what they have read are more apt to succeed and achieve in school and in life. Yet, the problem remains that we are increasingly a television society and even the Internet with the "You Tube" phenomenon in increasingly providing "sound bites" and "talking heads" to provide us with the latest political skullduggery.

The decline in literary reading is cause for concern.This writer is not saying that students should be forced to read Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn but that perhaps there should be a good deal of American literature that students should be exposed to- be it Catcher in the Rye or Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald or Faulkner.

There should be a consistent exposure to books of various genres and perhaps indeed, even some sort of" forced processing". Jeanne Chall of Harvard once mentioned that she had to write book reports on books that she had written and it did not kill her.

I think that there needs to be much more responsive writing done regarding what students are reading-even if it is their thoughts and ideas and feelings about good old Harry Potter.
J.K. Rowling's boy wonder has been the one bring shining star perhaps over the last twenty or so years in terms of getting children, adolescents, and yes, even adults reading again. Stephen King has carried that challenge for far too long.

Yet one wonders if there is some sort of pattern here- that only a select few writers can speak to the masses, or if there are only a few elite writers who speak to the intellectual needs of the few.
Yet, what are the needs of the many? What are the intellectual materials that students should be exposed to as they traverse their academic gauntlet from kindergarten to twelfth grade and then on to college? And what should the average college student be doing in terms of reading materials other than assigned texts in certain classes? (Some of these texts have been purchased "used" and sadly have been underlined and highlighted by some previous student who may have had a distinctly different processing style.)

Crain does optimistically state that perhaps we are in some sort of pendulum swing, and that the next few years will see a return to reading for pleasure, for enjoyment, for learning and for procuring a fund of information and knowledge- perhaps along the lines of E.D. Hirsch and his "Core Knowledge" program. And certainly any racial, ethnic or cultural group should feel free to construct their own lists of"required reading" to represent their specific group. I think of Alfred Tatum in this regard, and there are certainly others. In an educated civilized society students should be exposed to poems, plays, short stories, novels, novellas as well as biographies, autobiographies and historical novels as well as fiction and non-fiction. The "feel" of a text in one's hands is irreplaceable- young children seem to love those large picture books that transport them to a world of friendly frogs, and red Clifford dogs. The issue is how to make the transformation from friendly frogs to Mark Twain's "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County". Some publishers have exploited the issue of "feel ". The latest Clive Barker book, "Mister B. Gone" sports ancient parchment type of paper, which provides an antique feel for the book.

Educational theorists need to address the issue of the importance of reading, and the need for individuals to read not just inside school, but out of school also. My good friend and colleague from Denmark, Mogens Jansen is one of the few scholars who has devoted his time to this concept- the importance of outside reading and the need to have some type of on-going reading program. I have to apologize that with the various end of the year festivities my own independent reading program has crashed, but will be resurrected with Ayn Rand's Fountainhead. And I have at least exposed some students to Dylan Thomas' "A Child's Christmas in Wales" instead of the usual " 'Twas the Night Before Christmas" by Clement Clark Moore.

Educational theorists, as well as pragmatists need to help teachers cope with a culture that fosters "Cliff's Notes" as well as Monarch Notes and "Literature for Dummies".
Are there books that every American student should read? Is there any one book that every American that goes through the public school system should read? While children and college students are forced or mandated to read certain texts, there should be some books that should form a nucleus of American education. Who is to determine this core set of books? Or should this be a question posed to parents about to have a child? What are the top ten books that you believe that your child should read? Some individuals for whatever reason have a penchant for science fiction and the work of H.G. Wells.

Others feel the American western is the thing and others along with Shakespeare acknowledge that "the play's the thing". Yet what books have made the most impact on the greatest number of people and should these books be the required reading buffet for our students?

Crain notes that "No effort of will is likely to make reading popular again". It is incumbent upon educational theorists to propose ideas that will make reading popular again, and to test those ideas so that we have empirical evidence.

We need to have newer enthusiastic teachers who are able to say " this is how you motivate students to read Melville" and "this is how you get pupils to understand H.L. Mencken". We have to have principals who encourage Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as well as Jonathan Livingston Seagull. And we need librarians who promote not just the castle of Hogwarts, but the castle of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast Trilogy.

But most probably, we need parents who fill their living rooms with books instead of DVD's and Christmas presents under the tree that require book marks and not triple A batteries.
Perhaps we need more DEAR (Drop Everything and Read) programs in the schools or more SSR (Sustained Silent Reading) time. And perhaps School Boards should look more carefully at the text of Alfie Kohn " What Does it Mean to be Well Educated?"

Perhaps Kohn should re-write his text and subtitle it " What Does it Mean to be Well Educated in an age of No Child Left Behind? Or"What Does it Mean to be Well Educated in an Age of Inclusion and Mainstreaming?"

John Glover and Roger Bruning in their classic educational psychology text indicated quite simply that students who see parents read, and are read to, are more likely to read, enjoy reading and procure the habit. I am not sure if Steven Covey has reading as one of his habits of successful people, but I believe that independent is critical for the development of thought, critical thinking and higher order thinking- and the more of it, the better.

One does not learn to think critically by watching the pratfalling John Ritter in "Three's Company" or Erik Estrada in California Highway Patrol or "Chips". Indeed some readers may not even recognize these various ancient television programs because they have grown up on a different generation of programming. Certain college students came of age reading Hermann Hesse's "Demian"and "Steppenwolf" and the latest cadre of college freshmen are exposed to Jonathan Safran Foer's book " Everything is Illuminated".

The knowledge of different generations DOES differ- and rightfully so. We should not expect college students born in the 1990's to know about Fernandel or even Jack Benny. Nor would they be able to name the Beatles or know who Elvis was (Presley not Costello).
But we should hope that they would know a bit about Plato, Socrates, Chaucer and hopefully Shakespeare.

Exactly how much they should "know" or remember or understand is also up for debate.
As always there are political/social and other issues. Fifty years ago, the classrooms of America, and other nations around the world did not have students with a variety of exceptionalities. Currently, in our classrooms across the nation, we have students who are mainstreamed with various exceptionalities and other health impairments. There are students with learning disabilities, mental retardation, visual impairments, hearing impairments, benign congenital hypotonia, pervasive developmental delay and disorder as well as children with expressive and receptive language disorders and delays and asthma, epilepsy and diabetes. To paraphrase Winston Churchill " never in the course of human events have so many teachers been faced with so many challenges, with so little support and training".

It is obviously quite difficult to force a student who is blind to read- we can expose him or her to books or tape or on Braille, but one cannot coerce children with autism or mental retardation to read. For children with dyslexia, or to be perhaps more politically correct, children with a learning disability in reading, abridged novels may be more appropriate and appealing or again, books on tape, or even as a last resort, movies ( although watching Robert Redford in " The Great Gatsby" just doesn't seem to translate into what F. Scott Fitzgerald was trying to say). And although Henry Morton Robinson's book "The Cardinal" was made into a movie, the movie simply doesn't capture the rich, robust language and the poignancy of the book.

I am not sure "What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us", but I am fairly sure that he would think that we should read more, encourage more reading, and perhaps even have some discussion about what we have read and (gasp!) perhaps even write about what we have read in the form of book reviews- pro and con.

I do concur with Crain that we may be seeing a "twilight of the books" – we may be seeing a differential appreciation of reading- one in which very few people actually read a book, but analyze it in depth and savor the implications of what they have read.

We may be seeing a " twilight of the books" in terms of books that required extensive thought may become fewer in number and read only by those who have the time and the background knowledge and information to digest the message and implications of the book.

We may be approaching a "twilight of the books" that require thought and in depth analysis, and literary criticism and we may be seeing what is tantamount to the cheap dime store novellas or paperback books with poverty of content.

But if things are darkest before the dawn, we may also be seeing a resurgence of quality literature, books and reading and a return to the classics of the past, present and the future. It was Thomas Paine who wrote a small pamphlet called " Common Sense" that brought about the American Revolution.Hopefully, Crain's small piece in the New Yorker will strike a similar chord in readers and there will be a wide reverberation of it's message to at least delay the setting of the sun. And it was Hemingway who wrote " The Sun Also Rises ".

Hopefully, the New Year will bring about a resurgence in quality,in depth reading.

Soure Link:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/12/24/071224crat_atlarge-crain