Ask any man or woman on the street what the most pressing problem in America is today, and you'll get a smattering of similar responses: the deficit---or, wait, the 2nd Amendment! No, there are all those continuing battles, large and small, of the Arab Spring, and we have to help them.....except we shouldn't help them. Yeah, and all the stuff we send over there! But we have this struggling, anemic economic recovery that should be most important. And all these entitlements that senior citizens are draining dry! On and on, the list revolves through time, with a different issue sliding into the rotation every few years and another dropping off. I couldn't pretend to know enough about any of them to say which is most likely to bring our country down, but I believe I know the answer anyway, and it's none of these. Nor is it McDonald's, leading the pack of fast food vendors making Americans more obese each day, or BP polluting our oceans, or coal polluting our skies, though all of these have surely done their part.
What's killing America is much more immediate and frightening to me, and should be to all of us, because if it isn't within arm's reach of you, you can surely look out your window and see it, and it comes closer every day. You might even instinctively deny it immediately, as I have always done until faced with some vivid and painful reminders of late. You might even continue to deny it long after you read this, but I hope you'll leave it resting in your mind as I try to keep it in mine, to make sure I haven't forgotten this terror of our culture for a single day.
What's killing America? I don't know if you'll believe it or not, but here it is: it's illiteracy----but not the kind we grew up hearing about in my generation, where the older generations or those in certain socio-economic areas hadn't had opportunities to learn. It's rampant, willful, PROUD illiteracy that rejects education, reading especially, on the bewildering principle that it's outmoded, pointless, and boring. It is more than a kid thing, as well; often this attitude has been instilled by parents.
Let me see if I can break this down in a way that makes sense to us both.
A little more than 30 years ago, when I graduated from high school, I don't remember anyone who went to our high school (yes, I knew them all----it was small enough that K-12 was all in one building) who couldn't read. Some were better than others, but we all could read, and several of us were willing readers who always had a book on hand, despite the slim pickings of our school library. Fast forward about five years to my first teaching experiences as a graduate assistant, and I remember a middle-aged woman who was in one of the first remedial grammar classes I taught. The poor woman could not seem to pass any of the work that we did, and it was very basic, clearly structured grammatical equations that the average 4th grader would be able to complete. The students thrived and excelled with the program, almost all of them able to pass the required exam to pass on to Freshman Comp I the next semester. But I just couldn't make any headway with this woman. I finally discovered the answer about halfway through the semester: she had made a 5 on her ACT. She couldn't read at all, and in fact, spoke only very broken English; Cherokee had been her first language. She had come into the university on a Voc Rehab program, I think, but had obviously not been getting all the services she needed. It was my first real experience with illiteracy, the kind that comes from rampant life-long poverty, and though I didn't know what to do to help her, I've never forgotten the woman's face. Only a mere accident of birth put her in her situation, and me in mine. This is the true, tragic illiteracy I think most of us associate with that word: not a pejorative but a simple description of awful fact. This is NOT the kind of illiteracy that is about to take us under if we don't fight it now.
Today's illiterates are supremely confident that books---reading, and the proper application of grammar, spelling, mechanics, usage, and punctuation---are so antiquated as to be laughable. Why? Well, because of media, of course! Who needs books when you can watch almost anything you want to see at any time, on some kind of device? Of course, text language is doing the most damage to grammar and her sisters; one only has to scroll through a Facebook newsfeed to see the disdain with which they are treated in half of the statuses and comments. But Twitter, beginning to outpace Facebook the way it once did to MySpace, forces even more of those "acceptable" misuses and abuses with its 140-character limit.
Adding to the "Reading is Outdated" argument is the constant bombardment of media on young people's attention. How can I expect students to read 10 pages one night when they must look up and watch at least 100 new YouTube videos they've heard about? No, not how---WHY would I expect that? I say this with all sincerity: My students are genuinely puzzled, some stunned (or even incensed), by any homework request of that sort. Over the years, despite my internal conflicts over it, I've determined that if I want my students to read something, I'm going to have to read it with them in class. I start out the year making them read novels on their own, and they do Accelerated Reader points all year, but if we can read and discuss it in two class periods, max, we do that. Otherwise, I'd just be standing up there lecturing to people when I want a discussion. For the longer at-home assignments, I've tried to head off the invariable "I just couldn't get into it" excuse by telling them from the start of the year that whenever they are doing homework for my class, they should turn off ALL of their devices and leave them at the other end of the house, preferably with a parent. Every breath, I know, is wasted; the look of horror on their faces at the mere suggestion that they go without their phones is akin to demanding, "Your money or your life!"
I'm not just an old-lady English teacher stomping her feet in the dust of her crumbling career here: it's well-known and documented that because of all these types of technology, our young people (not just students---anyone who is super-attuned to media) have become functionally illiterate in not just reading, but in social settings. Just a couple of weeks ago, at dinner with some friends on Brookside, we watched two women, possibly mother and daughter, at a table near us, where the young woman stared constantly at her I-phone, scrolling, typing, smiling at the screen, totally ignoring her dinner partner. We decided the older woman must have been Mom when she reached over and touched the girl on the wrist, and Girl kind of shook her off. What? How is that ever, EVER, socially acceptable? Yet, if you've read this far, I bet you've seen the same thing. God help you if you've DONE it. If parents, friends, family are less important than the devices, how much farther down the scale does reading fall? How much farther does informed citizenship fall?!
Second on my list of attitudes against reading is that so many find it pointless. I can't fathom that at all, but then I don't remember ever not being fascinated by books. They were there from my earliest memories of my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother reading to me, curled up in their laps, the books so iconic in our lives that they rest on a shelf in my classroom, or on a high bookshelf behind me in my sister's office, where I'm writing tonight. I have hundreds---maybe 400, maybe a little more---of books in my home that date back to my childhood, up through the last purchases I made a couple of months ago. Stashed away until my two oldest nieces are old enough to read them, I have two copies of Little Women that I purchased at Louisa May Alcott's home in 2010, because I wanted to pass the joy I took in that old classic on to them. How, then, could I see sharp, incisive, rich books as pointless?
I can't see them that way because I'm a 49-year-old English teacher, of course; I'm not unaware of that. What I can't fathom is how any child of reasonably well-meaning parents could have an utter disdain for books....but I got a big eye-opener about that just a couple of weeks ago. I was discussing a poetic term, alliteration, which is a repeated consonant sound at the beginning of words, with my classes. I pointed out to them that our brains seem to respond to that repetition from infancy. To prove it, I asked them to remember back to the first books they heard, and possibly how they drove their parents crazy asking to have certain books read over and over again. What books were they? About half of the kids responded immediately with what I expected: Dr. Seuss, who was nothing if not alliterative and repetitive in his rhythm and syntax. These students understood the correlation immediately. The other half of the students said they didn't have books read to them at home. I'm NOT overstating that number, though the kids might have been---there are always a few who want to shock us to gain pity or at least attention. But the reality did strike me: Just as there is a correlation between our recognition of repeated sounds in children's and adult literature, there must be a corellation between those with no home reading experience and a disdain for reading that may come from a lack of exposure to it as an enjoyable activity, or even from a learned attitude from a parent. Either way, with such a high number of students having no exposure to books before school, there's really no surprise that they see them as pointless. I've always worked hard at making every piece of literature relevant to the lives of my students, and I've hit the mark maybe a little more often than not. But that's not good enough for these new people who will proudly, loudly, proclaim their opposition to reading as pointless (and a number of other adjectives somewhat more vicious, or even obscene, than this). I don't yet know what WILL be good enough for me to do on my own; whatever it is, we're all going to have to put in our time to change it.
Finally, today's illiterates see anything, ANYTHING, in print as "boring," "too hard," or just "too many words" to ever be dealt with. They're so tired of life, with a sense of ennui that I used to only associate with jaded yuppies, snooty Europeans, and literary characters suffering from TB or an over-blown sense of self. Not so anymore. Here's the quickest, freshest case in point I can give you on this one, and it was a shocker: several weeks ago, my juniors and I spent three days studying the Declaration of Independence, reading it through, discussing point by point, and then completing a notes page designed to help them remember some of the important infractions that Jefferson et. al. enumerated against King George III. This is one of my favorite pieces to study in the entire year, to see the kids come to the realization that everything they enjoy today comes as a direct result of this document. We were done with the group work and the students were working on their notes, when I got a question posed in such frustrated sincerity that it left me utterly speechless for a moment: "Ms. Welker, have they written a newer version of this? Like, has anyone remade it? Because these guys used a lot of words that we just don't have anymore." The Declaration.....is hard, and boring? No, it isn't, not at all, if you are willing to see the relevance in each point, how we would feel if we'd experienced what the colonists did: a standing army hostile to us, a judicial system functioning only on the king's whims, taxation without representation, trade with the rest of the world cut off, and every other point we went over in detail. It was not that they couldn't understand it; they didn't want to read to find answers to their notes, even though we'd read it through twice, because it was hard, and that made it boring.
I don't think we have to look very far to find what makes written words boring to many people of all ages today: it's the "damn box," as Laura and I always called it. Of course, they aren't made as boxes now; they're as thin and flat as possible, all of that money and technology that used to be so unwieldy now redistributed to the surface area, to provide screens of an unnatural clarity and brightness of color even Walt Disney himself could never have imagined. Why would anyone pick up a book when wall-sized characters of our choice will dance, sing, live their own "reality," or deliver our brand of news or sports at any time, day or night? I got my own sad reality check about this when I realized several months ago that I had virtually stopped reading, because I'd discovered so many new shows since I'd been recording things on my DVR to skip commercials. I didn't like the person that made me; I didn't know who she was. For most of my life, I'd been a limited TV viewer at best until after Laura died. I've had to watch my computer time, as well, because 3 hours can melt away in no time at all if I sit down with no schedule in mind. Not that I'm some paragon of literary virtue---I'm just as likely to read junky stuff as quality stuff---but if this lover of books could get so enamored of tech and TV, how much more likely would it be for someone who never loved the written word?
Even if I've convinced you of the types of disdain for literacy that abound today, you may not see this as what's bringing our country to the brink of disaster. I submit the simple corollary that to be a free republic, we must be an informed republic, and an informed republic cannot be made up of illiterates. Further, those who find no sustenance in being able to read, write, and comprehend our native language will most certainly be unwilling to work with those of other languages and cultures, yet we all know that this is the world that our young people will have to function in, the one they will have to compete in for their survival. Can we possibly sit by and be passive about their arrogance, however unwitting it may be? Of course we can't, any more than one of us can change the culture. It will take an enormously concerted, conscious effort.
We must read to and with our children, starting even before birth.
We must model good reading habits for people of all ages.
We must make rules about media having only a certain amount of influence in our lives and our children's lives.
We must talk with our families, over meals or in cars, at bedtime or any other quiet time, about what we read and think and know.
We must be diligent in supporting groups that encourage reading and free and open thought.
We must believe always in the sanctity of the written word, properly used.
We must never forget that as the minds of our people go, so will our country go. Put another way: trash in, trash out. That's where we're headed if we keep to the current path. But I have faith in the ability to create change. We can do much better than we have today.
We can pick up a book and not only save the life of our country, but of everyone we love.
No comments:
Post a Comment