I realized after 70 years that my first big break was when I was five: I learned to read and write ... so that for me was the break.
— Sean Connery
By Dan Hagen
As I recall, the first word I could read was “meteorite.”
They were always falling to earth in Action Comics, you see, to cause some strange catastrophe or other for the long-suffering citizens of Metropolis.
Although I was too young to attend school, I longed to read Superman’s adventures for myself, rather than having them read to me by an indulgent adult, pleasant though that was.
After all, all the adults I knew — my grandparents, my mother and father, my aunt Shirley — read books and magazines whenever they got the chance. The silent enjoyment on their rapt faces was palpable, particularly in the case of my mother, a voracious and erudite reader whose walls full of books inspired and intrigued me.
Clearly this mysterious art provided some kind of powerful, ineffable pleasure, and I wanted in on it. And anyway, only babies couldn’t read, everybody knew that.
Now, I wonder with a little chill what might have happened to four-year-old Danny if he lived in 2012 instead of 1958. The chill comes because I fear I know the answer.
Danny would be playing some superb Spider-Man video game, not reading Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s comics about Spidey. Why merely read about a character when, instead, you can BE the character?
“Literature now competes with an enormous array of electronic media,” noted Dana Gioia, National Endowment for the Arts chairman. “While no single activity is responsible for the decline in reading, the cumulative presence and availability of electronic alternatives increasingly have drawn Americans away from reading.”
Interactive gaming is not the villain here. Its achievements are brilliant, and it has enhanced the quality and variety of leisure available to Americans.
In truth, reading has long been a vulnerable pastime in this country, in part because of the anti-intellectual strain in the American character. While Americans like doers, and that’s admirable, they are often churlishly suspicious of thinkers.
All too often, Americans are willing to follow any lamebrain who claims metaphysical certainty, like those religious fanatics who are screaming about nonexistent “activist judges.”
People who have all the answers hate reading, and they hate books. Intellectual exploration is a threat to their way of life, which requires a high, thick wall of ignorance to protect their irrational beliefs.
Well, the pro-ignorance crowd can take comfort in the fact that reading, writing and reasoning skills are on the decline. A National Association of Manufacturers poll on skill deficiencies among employees found that poor reading ability ranked second. American corporations, complaining that college graduates can’t write, now spend an annual $3.1 billion on remedial writing instruction for employees.
“The decline of reading is also taking its toll in the civic sphere. In a 2000 survey of college seniors from the top 55 colleges, the Roper Organization found that 81 percent could not earn a grade of C on a high school-level history test,” Gioia noted.
Case in point: An Eastern Illinois University professor told me that none of the students in his class understood his reference to the term “Abu Ghraib.”
“(D)eclining rates of literary reading coincide with declining levels of historical and political awareness among young people. One of the surprising findings of ‘Reading at Risk’ was that literary readers are markedly more civically engaged than nonreaders, scoring two to four times more likely to perform charity work, visit a museum, or attend a sporting event. One reason for their higher social and cultural interactions may lie in the kind of civic and historical knowledge that comes with literary reading.
“Unlike the passive activities of watching television and DVDs or surfing the Web, reading is actually a highly active enterprise. Reading requires sustained and focused attention as well as active use of memory and imagination. Literary reading also enhances and enlarges our humility by helping us imagine and understand lives quite different from our own,” Gioia said.
Reading has one saving grace left, for the moment — you still have to be able to do it, to understand “text,” to control a computer. But that will change, perhaps very quickly, and soon we will be able to interact with computers entirely by voice.
Then, within a generation or two, I suspect we will see the emergence of the New Illiterates. They will be manipulating technology they don’t understand at all — or, as is more likely, will be manipulated by people who do understand it. And they will be blind to the wonders they’re missing.
Reading helps facilitate structured thought. The ability to read well and widely, and the quality of thought itself, will forever be combined.
Heraclitus observed that a man’s character is his fate — an observation I know from reading, of course. Well, a nation’s character is also its fate. Imagine, therefore, what illiteracy says about the character of a man or a nation, and then imagine what fate that implies.
No comments:
Post a Comment