Prophecies

In 1971, my mother enrolled my brothers in the Fundamental School, a public elementary school that promised to focus on the three R’s, reading, writing, and arithmetic. I’m not sure how their elementary school experience was different than the one my sister and I had, but my mom was hopeful that they would get a better, more focused education in an environment that didn’t spend time creating wall murals on butcher paper. For what it’s worth, we were all good students and did more or less the same in high school and college.

My mom’s concerns were not unique. Rudolph Flesch’s 1955 book Why Johnny Can’t Read—and What You Can Do About It is still in print and is available on Amazon for only $10.40. It’s sort of odd that I am familiar with the title of a book published before I was born and that people younger than me are blogging about exactly this phrase. It seems that education hasn’t improved much since Flesch’s book—or at least the market for books about the dismal state of education is still pretty healthy.

As a result, I’m not terribly alarmed by the ominous prophecies in our readings.

It seems like someone is always complaining that young people just aren’t the same as they used to be. In “Teaching and Reading the Millennial Generation through Media Literacy,” 2007 article published in the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, David Considine observed that in “times of rapid technological change, it has been typical for adults to criticize the academic achievement and work ethic of their own children” (471). He noted that this has been going for thousands of years and even Greek philosopher Socrates was critical Athenian teenagers and their deficient education.

Sven Birkerts’ 1994 book entitled The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age is equally alarmist, claiming that “our students are less and less able to read, or analyze, or write with clarity and purpose” (119).

Stephen Johnson’s April 2009 article “How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write,” published in the Wall Street Journal, states that that instant web access “may be great news for the dissemination of knowledge,” but predicts that it is “not necessarily so great for that most finite of 21^st-century resources, attention” (2).

Similarly, in his 2008 Atlantic Online article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” Carr suggests that the internet seems to be “chipping away at [his] capacity for concentration and contemplation” (2).

He cites Bruce Friedman, a pathologist and member of the faculty at the University of Michigan Medical School, who complained of a “staccato” quality in his thinking as a result of scanning short passages from online texts. He says he can no longer read War and Peace.

I have never read War and Peace. I tried, but, like Friedman, I couldn’t concentrate. Sadly, I can’t blame the internet for my inability to engage the text. Small children and laundry are significant distractions. So is 19^th century prose. Most of us just don’t think that way anymore.

Is that wrong? Does that demonstrate holes in our education, or is it a sign of something else?

In my other reality, the one outside academia, not everyone cares about history and most people don’t read classics in their spare time

They also don’t think about old or new media literacies or how those technologies influence the way they think.

Technology is part of life, and most people use whatever technologies work best.

Carr cites developmental psychologist Maryanne Wolf, who notes that reading “is not an instinctive skill for human beings” and it’s “not etched into our genes the way speech is” (3).

It’s true.

Our culture had to transition from an oral to a written tradition. It took thousands of years for reading and writing to become such a part of the fabric of life that we take it for granted that all men and women should learn.

We’ve been reading about the development of the printed word and the ways this development has changed the way we think, the way we respond to each other, the way we process information, the way we generate new discoveries.

That development has brought us to this point.

It has brought us to new technologies that once again are changing the way we think, respond to each other, the way we process information, and the way we generate new discoveries.

Just like the new technology of print privileged certain ideologies, strengths, and learning modalities these new media technologies privilege certain ideologies, strengths, and learning modalities. The hierarchies have not been erased; new hierarchies have been created.

After touting the utopian Wikipedia goals of “shared principles” and the “focus on neutrality,” Henry Jenkins acknowledged that the “decentralized nature of knowledge production . . . results in some surprising gaps and excesses” (3). Science fiction authors are apparently more interesting to Wikipedia contributors than dead presidents.

And although Wikipedia has become pretty standard, the “participatory culture” that Jenkins celebrates only includes a small percentage of users.

Still, it is hard to believe that the ability to concentrate has been lost when the rate of technological innovation has increased exponentially.

It’s not gone—it’s just different.

After sounding an alarm, Carr concedes that we should be skeptical of his skepticism (6). After all, a similar alarm was sounded when writing threatened the status quo.

“Teaching and Reading the Millennial Generation through Media Literacy.” David Considine, Julie Horton, Gary Moorman Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Vol. 52, No. 6 (Mar., 2009), pp. 471-481 Published by: International Reading Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20468390 Accessed: October 26, 2009.