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Flame » in reply to re: Illiteracy as pop culture.

re: Illiteracy as pop culture.
TB — (archived)

It doesn't take much work to find sensationalist news stories even generations ago, so I don't think the Fall of Civilization rides on this point.

However, it doesn't take long to find examples of elementary school reading and writing a hundred years ago, from students taught in one-room schoolhouses by teachers who were anything but trained professionals. Writing with complex terms and sentences, of the sort that seniors in high school generate now, with luck.

What are your kids reading in their schools? The classics? Things that have big words in them? Does it still bother anyone that if you ask a thousand kids which book they read last year, most of them would probably say "Harry Potter?" And nothing else?

I did my best with my own kids, reading to them constantly as children. The walls of my offices are all covered with shelving. I have an entire wall of fiction and non-fiction that I would have sold a kidney for when I was in junior high school. My own kids have probably read about a dozen or so of these hundreds of books. If you subtract Harry Potter and Terry Pratchett, the number becomes pathetic. I'm not counting books required for school. "Bridge to Terebithia" is good, but it ain't no "Moby Dick" or "Once and Future King."

Too much TV? Sure. I suspect having more than the five channels I had to work with as a kid has a lot to do with this. Restrict the TV? Sure. I tried this once, and my daughter rewired the cable system around my shutoff.

And yet....

My kids are very smart. They are fast thinkers, with good wits and extensive vocabularies. They get good grades in school, and their reading speed, when they do read, is very fast. My daughter just made the Dean's List at a private university.

But they don't read for fun all that much.

Maybe I'm worried about nothing. Maybe this is just a cultural change, and I'm like the old griot in Africa, complaining that these modern kids and their marks on paper can't remember a story more than two hours long word for word.

After all, you don't have to meet that many functionally-illiterate people to know that "illiterate" is not the same thing as "stupid" by a very long shot.

I take some comfort that the phrase "kids these days" is as old as written language for sure, and no doubt a hell of a lot older.

I do wish there was more competition in our education system, though.

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