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About the Author
Laurie Fendrich, a painter who lives and works in New York, is a professor of fine arts at Hofstra University. Her writing has focused on the place of art and artists in society and the education of young artists, but she has also written essays questioning the viability of beauty in a post-Darwin era, the meaning of abstract painting, and the tyranny of outcomes assessment. She will blog about university life, the arts. and culture.
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The Literacy Debate Is Political
Ah, here we go again. In an article written by Motoko Rich in today’s New York Times, there’s yet another summary of what, and how, the nation’s young people are reading, and the surrounding debate about what it all means for the future of reading.
Once more: Young people no longer read books for fun. The little reading they do, outside of school, takes place on the Internet. And because kids are spending more time than ever on the Internet, they rarely get to read a sustained narrative. Instead, they read as if they are leapfrogs, jumping willy-nilly from Web site to Web site. Since they no longer read books — especially long ones — they never learn the skills we oldsters developed of crawling along in turtle-like fashion, following a sustained and steady narrative determined by an unseen author. Put this information together with what are at best flat-line reading scores, many experts say, and we see a clear relation of (bad) cause and (bad) effect.
There are plenty of defenders of Web reading, however, who vigorously argue that Web reading at least gets young people to read. (The implication is that this is a promising thing for both the future of education and democracy itself.) Moreover, defenders of Web reading argue, reading on the Web not only prepares students for the real 21st-century world, it also more genuinely reflects how we act in that world. To the Web reading advocates, reading on the Internet is as important a skill as traditional book reading. Some experts even advocate testing Internet skills the way we test traditional reading and math skills.
Traditional reading proponents argue back that reading books offers more time for reflection on, and absorption of, deep ideas, provides access to great minds from previous centuries and other cultures, and establishes a common cultural ground for everyone. Some suspect that Webophilia will irrevocably alter the human brain—a malleable organ that readily develops new synaptic connections according to the challenges it confronts—to the point where human beings will end up losing the ability to comprehend straight-line narratives.
The literacy debate has now reached the saturation point. It’s repeatedly grinding the same information into the same dusty, either/or conclusions: Read books and be smart or read on the Internet and be dumb. Yet the thrust of history is irreversible. Like it or not, most people will turn more and more in2 (like that?) nothing but Web readers.
The reading question, therefore, has now turned political. A new elite — a new oligarchy, if you will — consisting of people who are equal masters of both Web and book reading will emerge.
The people who can move fluidly from Facebook, realpolitics.com and Twitter to War and Peace and The Origin of Species may end up being a small group, but they’ll be an elite and powerful group that will present a new and daunting challenge to everybody else.
(Image from Photobucket.com)
Posted at 10:02:35 AM on July 27, 2008 | All postings by Laurie FendrichComments
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Yes, indeed. And more professors, regardless of age, should themselves strive to be members of that “new elite” in order to be able to better assess its progress and impact.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Jul 27, 11:12 AM · #
Fendrich hits the nail on the head:
The [false] debate has settled around books vs. web.
Are that many people really so stupid as to not think BOTH are important, perhaps equally so [at least by college]?
I just find the position of “the web is the future!” to be the weaker of the 2 positions anyway. If it’s the future, how about we focus on the present just a bit? And since when did the old maxim of “history repeats itself” become passe? [Yeah, I know, when it suited whichever political figure you hate most.]
There is still a digital divide, and a whole bunch of the so-called “digital natives” have no idea what they’re reading. TMZ.com does not have the same level of credibility as CNN.com, except of course when it comes to expertise in celebutante crotch.
The true issue remians on content, not medium. Reading some hack author published with numerous typographical errors and hackneyed prose might be just as bad as some dullard’s txt-esed MySpace rant against…well, anything from HPV vaccinations to American Idol contestants.
Quality needs to be stressed more than medium.
— anon · Jul 27, 01:56 PM · #
We can deny these inevitabilities (short of a meteor strike) at our peril:
1. Reading on electronic media will supercede—though not necessairly obsolesce—reading on paper.
2. More than half the people in this country will speak Spanish as their first language
3. We will, for all practical purposes, run out of oil.
Printed-page purists, English-Only-ists, fossil-fuel Pollyannas are only clones of King Canute. And speaking of cloning…
— LuckyJim · Jul 27, 02:29 PM · #