Happy Father's Day

Of the many lasting gifts my parents have given to me, my love of reading and literature is the most satisfying, intellectually stimulating, and even lucrative, as it led to my profession. My parents raised a reader long before it was a popular campaign with big name advocates.

My Dad was the major reader when I was very young, but both my parents shared the effort - and I'm sure the sessions of Doctor Dan or "The White Bed That Ran Away" became somewhat of an effort after the first six hundred or so repetitions!

So Happy Father's Day to my Dad. And thanks to both my parents for raising a reader.

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?

Is There a Book in this Class?

After the culture wars, the deconstruction, and the arguments about texts and authors, the Great Books are still there and still defensible.  

W.A.Pannapacker, in his article "Confessions of a Middlebrow" in The Chronicle Review (Oct 5/09), defends the middlebrow culture that gave rise to Adler and Hutchins' (University of Chicago) Great Books in 1952. The Harvard Classics (Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf of 51 books), an earlier expression of the same drive for knowledge, appeared in 1909.

According to Pannapacker, the Great  Books were popular because they "were expressions of hope for many people who had historically not had access to higher education." People wanted to better themselves, and knowledge held the key.

Pannapacker acknowledges the issues surrounding the canon and the idea of "greatness:"

By the end of the 1980s—when I was an undergraduate—it had become clear to seemingly everyone in authority that the notion of "Greatness" was a tool of illegitimate power; Adler and Hutchins were racist and sexist in their choices of texts; their valorization of the "Western World" made them complicit with imperialism and worse.

Regardless, Pannapacker and others believe there is still a place for the Great Books. They speak to an earlier time when the intellectual life was more highly valued:

What has been lost, according to Jacoby, is a culture of intellectual effort. We are increasingly ignorant, but we do not know enough to be properly ashamed...The rejection of the Great Books signifies a declining belief in the value of anything without a direct practical application, combined with the triumph of a passive entertainment—as anyone who teaches college students can probably affirm.

We need a resurgence of the intellectual life; we need to wrest education away from those who are proudly ignorant and feel no shame about it. As Pannapacker notes: "The Great Books had a narrower conception of "greatness" than we might like today, but their foundational ideals were radically egalitarian and proudly intellectual."

We could do worse than to teach "Arnold's vision of culture as 'the best that has been thought and known in the world'."

W.A. Pannapacker is associate professor of English at Hope College; he is the author of Revised Lives: Walt Whitman and Nineteenth-Century Authorship.

I would like to invite W.A. Pannapacker to my soiree.