StormHaven

DUNCES IN THE CORNER

I sort of hate to start levelling charges of national ignorance and sinking intellection as we're in the midst of Wallace Stevens where national ignorance and sinking intellection seem to be the emotions-of-the-day, so I'll let Susan Jacoby do it in her piece in The Washington Post which appeared yesterday, Sunday, 17 February.  Have a look at it.  As I've been reading Stevens, I've felt strangely evidentiary in this argument that America is losing its collective intelligence.  You have to wonder:  the NEA report was one thing, this article is another, the level of political conversation on the television still another . . . books O books . . . that whole lament about the demise of print culture.  Is this more of the same sort of doom-saying prophecy that is as old as the written records or does this mark a new trend in a downward slide.  Note:  I did hear Toby Keith say several years ago that his foreign policy was real simple:  "You hit me, I hit you back harder."  And there were many hysterical cheers.  It obviously stuck with me because I still remember it.  I don't know why exactly except maybe it had something to do with a coarseness of thought that suddenly catches fire and becomes trendy so that . . . well, that's enough.  Have a look at the piece and see what you think.

RADIOS, TV'S, VCR'S, CD'S, iPODS, VIDEO-GAME PLATFORMS, COMPUTERS & AMERICAN LITERACY

You want to talk about a video eyeball?  "Reading at Risk" opines that in 1999, a study showed that the average American child lives in a household with 2.9 televisions (I have 4), 1.8 VCR's (I have none; 9 years later who needs them?), 3.1 radios (maybe I have one, but I don't know where it is), 1.4 video game players (that's sooo nineties; I have an XBox 360, PS3, and am regularly visited by my son's Wii), and 2 computers (we have 2 laptops, and are dreaming about one for the kitchen, and a gaming computer for my son's room.) 

My Utopian video-vision is straight from Any Given Sunday, where Al Pacino's house is crowded with huge flatscreens playing Ben Hur all the time (I'd play The Sopranos on a loop, and if Cameron Diaz wanted to hang around, that would be fine as well, and if I could just be Al Pacino for one day that would be even better).   My point is fairly mundane, but fairly important:  we are irrevocably a video culture.  I use "irrevocably" with some hesitation, but I don't see American business calling a halt to yearly more affordable, massive flat screens that now appear in McMansions over the mantel in the living room--now called the "great room"--where oil paintings used to appear.  The danger for us in the education business, particularly in the English education business, is that we tend to extrapolate from our own lives, lives that are perhaps not quite as techno-philic as they could be.  This might be a matter of taste and preference or it might be a matter of salary.  For me, it's pretty clear that it's a matter of salary. 

But what we do to make a living--read books, talk about them, and write about them--occupies a far different place in the daily lives of Americans than it did when English departments were created in the early twentieth century.  English Departments can change, but most often they do so at a snail's pace, and do so initially by "offering a course" that tries to wrestle with the new interests that are showing up on the horizon, courses like "The Language of Situational Comedy in the 1980's" or "Seinfeld Redivivus:  "Friends" and the Tevevisual Comic Tradition."  Nothing wrong with these courses, but they are vaguely troubling, an ill-fit, slightly embarassing both for the departments that offer them and the shows they attempt discuss.

"To Read or Not to Read" offers the usual battery of statistics to show us that reading is declining, the sky is falling, and we--readers and teachers of reading--need to do something to stop the decline.  If you look at page 8, you see that the older you get, the more time you spend each week reading.  And you see that the young people are multi-tasking, using other "media" to help them through a session with a book:  iPods, TV, whatever it takes to break up the monotony of holding and staring at a book.  And of course we're not spending the money on books that we used to spend in 1985, during the Reagan years.  But that's partly because of Reaganomics, which hit the middle class hard, and adjusting for inflation, as the report claims to do, will not fix this problem.  Fewer dollars today to spend, and hardbacks now costing $25.00 . . . that's one very real aspect of the problem.  Book-buying has moved out of some people's lives financially.

Our younger readers are not reading as well either.  Or so we are told.  From 1992 to 2005 the percentage of 12-th graders reading at or above the proficient level has declined 5 percentage points.  The gap between males and females is growing as well.  Young men are falling behind young women.  This is troubling not only for teachers, but for employers as well who understandably prefer that their employees be able to read proficiently, particularly at the management level.  Employers report, however, that increasingly they confront applicants who don't read proficiently.  Less advanced readers aren't promoted.  Those who aren't promoted don't perfrom as well as those who do, and so with more unskilled readers arriving in the job market, the problem of performance on the job is magnified. 

The report ends by stating, flatly, that "no attempt has been made . . . to delve into income traits of voluntary readers," and therein lies a problem.  Particularly when we arrive at the third publication, "The Arts and Civic Engagement."  Let me offer one in-depth response to the first of the "10 Key Findings:"  Literary readers and classical or jazz radio listeners attend arts events at higher rates than non-readers and non-listeners. 

In-depth response:  Checked out the tickets prices at the Walton Art Center lately?

So, we're trying to teach English literature to a group of readers who are increasingly becoming less readerly, year by year.  And we're doing this within a culture that is becoming equally more video-centric.  Who is to blame?  The young reader?  The culture in which the young reader comes of age?  Both?  Neither?

We can poke holes in the NEA's findings, as I've done, here and there.  We can agree with their findings in traditional ways, as many did.  We can vilify the technology.  We can vilify literary theory, as many conservative journals did when the NEA findings came out several years ago.  And we can take a middle path as well.

But what we have to do, as toilers in the vineyard, as the only real toilers in the real vineyard, is come to terms with what is happening to our students and to our potential students who might wish to undertake the advanced study of English and American literature. 

How do we teach the study of texts in a visually oriented culture?

And by the way, there are definitive responses to the NEA's report in the February Harper's by Ursula K. Leguinn (available to subscribers online) and The New Yorker (December 24 & 31 2007) by Caleb Crain, available to all here.