Raise a Reader

Tiddlywinks requires skill and teaches hand/eye coordination. Stamp collecting teaches history, geography, and classification skills, among other things. Both can be replaced by other hobbies with equal claims for offering the same knowledge and a similar skill set.

Reading is in its own category and can't so easily be replaced. Reading (writing, too) is intricately involved with critical thinking, communication, language skills, concentration, and knowledge acquisition. There isn't anything else that functions cognitively the same way that reading does.

Reading isn't replacable!

But reading - the long, slow, digesting, thinking, analyzing kind - is becoming increasingly unpopular, with more and more people admitting that a quick skim of almost anything printed is all they are able to manage. 

Many of the books that adults do read are written at a grade level for younger teens. Many newspapers in recent years have lowered the level of difficulty of the writing to try and cater to readers' diminishing skills.

Patrick Kingsley, in his article "The Art of Slow Reading" in The Guardian (Jul 15/10), writes about the problem, citing many experts who argue that the internet is responsible (and some who argue otherwise).The problem with the internet:

because...we have become very good at collecting a wide range of factual titbits, we are also gradually forgetting how to sit back, contemplate, and relate all these facts to each other.

Mark Bauerlein in The Dumbest Generation makes much the same point. He argues that while students (especially) are intelligent and can multi-task, while they have the whole world of information at their fingertips, they don't have either the background knowledge or the cognitive skills to make the connections that lead to real knowledge and real ability to negotiate with the world in many ways. What's missing? Reading ability.

A student once complained to me that the literature we were studying was too difficult and that he didn't like it! While I won't tell you exactly what I thought at the time,  I did wonder what purpose it would serve to have those as two criteria for a university literature course. Unfortunately, ease and fun are becoming two of the most important criteria. The result is exactly what Bauerlein predicts - the dumbest generation.

Bauerlein paraphrases Ronald Reagan - who said that freedom can be lost in a generation - saying that knowledge can be lost in a generation. Sometimes I wonder if it will take that long.

Tiddlywinks may be more fun and easier than reading, but what will kids do if they have to read the instructions?

Educating Millennials for Fun and Profit

Are they the generation of dumb narcissists or the rising, altruistic change-makers? Opinion seems divided, yet the split is hardly even.

Eric Hoover, in his article "The Millennial Muddle" in The Chronicle of Higher Education (Oct. 2009), ponders the wealth of information, circulating since the 90s, about the millennial generation, particularly about the millennials as students.

One of the most influential books on the subject is Millennials Rising: The Next Generation by Neil Howe and William Strauss. According to Hoover, in their view millennials are "rule followers, who were engaged, optimistic, and downright pleasant." They will build new institutions with smiles and team spirit.

This rosy picture is the engine that drives marketing, consulting services, and, unfortunately, pedagogy and policies in contemporary colleges and universities. The millennials are consumers.

Selling this rosy picture and explaining what millennials want is good business. The problem is that it just doesn't fit with what professors and social scientists find in their research and sitting in front of them in class. Howe and the late Strauss "were not social scientists," neither were they in those classrooms.

Hoover devotes much of his article to Mark Bauerlein, Jean M. Twenge, and Fred A. Bonner II, professors and researchers who see quite a different picture. Interesting, also, that their primary focus is education, not business.

Bauerlein finds that the millennials are dangerously ignorant and illiterate. His book The Dumbest Generation outlines his research and experience.

   Generation Me, by Jean M. Twenge, a psychology professor who has studied generational differences, is about the rise in narcissim and entitlement she found in the millennials - the "everyone gets a trophy" generation.

Fred A. Bonner II approaches the issue of diversity in the millennial generation. The students he writes about in his forthcoming book Diverse Millennials in College don't match the upper middle-class white kids that Howe and Strauss based their work on.

 It is foolish nonsense to think that the youngest and least knowledgeable about what (and how) they need to learn should dictate. It is criminal for the adults who know better to allow it in order to turn a profit.

Approaching millennials as consumers of education denies them their right to a genuine education.

The Belatedness of Criticism

In his recent article "Diminishing Returns in Humanities Research" in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Mark Bauerlein laments what he sees as redundancy in a vast sea of literary criticism, which demonstrates

the shift from criticism-as-explanation to criticism-as-performance. Instead of thinking of scholarship as the explication of the object—what a poem means or a painting represents—humanists cast criticism as an interpretative act, an analytical eye in process.

Bauerlein argues that the overwhelming number of works comes from not only the demands of theory, but also as the consequence of the publish or perish imperative for those who seek tenure - especially for those experiencing belatedness in criticism. What to do when all the good stuff's been said?

For tenure decisions, Bauerlein recommends that committees look only at 100 pages of material. He further suggests that

subsidizers should shift their support away from saturated areas and toward unsaturated areas, in particular toward research into teaching and even more toward classroom and curricular initiatives.

The shift in subsidies should occur because the numbers of students who do not attend or pay attention in classes is quite staggering:

in the 2007 Your First College Year survey, conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute, ...70 percent skipped class, 62 percent "came late," and 44 percent fell asleep. Their engagement with instructors outside of class is similarly tenuous. Their engagement with instructors outside of class is similarly tenuous. On the 2008 National Survey of Student Engagement, 38 percent of first-year students "never" discussed ideas from readings or classes, and 39 percent did so only "sometimes."

More "research into teaching and...classroom and curricular initiatives" as the solution to the problem puts the onus on faculty to somehow counter the effects of the digital age Bauerlein writes about in his book The Dumbest Generation.

The digital age and resulting drop in reading, the self-absorption in juvenile pursuits and interests are surely the business of faculty, but should hardly drive research in the humanities.

I agree with Bauerlein's premise that there is too much redundant performance criticism out there, but I do not agree with his solutions. Still, it is refreshing to see someone tackling the issues.

I would like to invite Mark Bauerlein to my soiree.