My mother taught me to read when I was three years old. She told me she made me play school. This sparked my love of the written word, although, at that young age, I wouldn’t have known what the “written word” was. My mom was raising four children alone on a draw of $4.50 an hour against her commissions, leaving no money for books.
I read my grandmother’s Reader’s Digest books and borrowed books from the library, always having to pay for returning them late because I never wanted to give them back. Some books were like friends. I told myself that someday, when I had the money, I would buy the books I wanted, so I would never have to give them back. And I was right because today I am a bibliophile.
When I started working washing dishes when I was 13, having read The Lord of The Rings, I took my money to the ReadMore bookstore and bought paperback books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the author of the Tarzan book series. Once I finished those, I moved on to Conan the Barbarian by Robert E. Howard. Someone once said that most people live one life, but readers experience many lives through the characters in their books. From that time forward, I have never been without a book.
In eighth grade, I had to take a reading assessment. My assessment pegged me at the fourth year of college. Every day of high school found me trying to drop out. My teachers were boring, but my books were more exciting.
As time moved on, I started to read nonfiction titles acquiring information unknown. I also started to read history and science books, which provided a better experience than any high school teacher I had. I wanted to know how things worked, but I wasn’t engaged.
When I went to college at 26 years old, I chose political science as my major, and I chose English literature as a minor, but did the work to have it as a major. I read everything assigned to me until I ran out of classes to take under English literature. As luck would have it, I had a professor who allowed me to write my own syllabus.
The first course I designed myself was a list of classics I had never read. My deal with my professor was that I would only read the books, and she would ask me questions to determine my grade. The second syllabus I created covered 13 Shakespeare plays, about a third of his works.
A Lowering Reading Standards
The new editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal, Emma Tucker, has decided to “shake off the unnecessary stuffiness” and cater to a broader and primarily online audience. I am positive this decision makes business sense for a post-literate America, but lowering the standards comes with a price, one that may contribute to the decline of reading.
Is it better to make the paper more accessible, or would it be better to stretch the reader, potentially helping them to expand their reading comprehension, their vocabulary, and their ability to read increasingly difficult books and articles and other forms of the written word.
Perhaps it is important to make publications easy to read, and that is all to the good. But the standards have been lowered to the level that would-be readers look at pictures, charts, videos, or audio, all of which are more passive than reading.
Recognize that passive content doesn’t require the activity of reading the work, moving down the page, and determining what the words mean. This change in how we consume content may have some impact on our ability to think freely and challenge what we hear and see, as video and audio may be perceived as having greater authority.
The cable news stations changed their business model from reporting the news to choosing a particular political narrative. As part of this model, these news channels remove anything that would threaten the audience. The danger it presents is greater political divisiveness, where our neighbors are our enemies.
Something Less Than Reading
One must be concerned that we are educating people on TikTok. Nothing good can come from a population of people who cannot read a newspaper. If there is a lower standard than TikTok, I cannot imagine what it might be.
An article in The Hechinger Report titled “Proof Points: Why reading comprehension is deteriorating” reports that “before the pandemic eighth graders declined substantially [in reading skills].” It continues, “Scholars have been trying to figure out why their scores dropped so much between 2017 and 2019.”
Researchers at the American Institute of Research suggest teens are reading less and enjoying it less. With no research necessary, it’s clear that our technology has a large impact on reading, and with that, on young people’s reading comprehension. Teens and middle schoolers consume massive amounts of short, passive social content, like TikTok and YouTube videos, which leaves less time for reading. There is a difference between content and literature. Anything, no matter how mindless, can be content. Literature requires a level of research, thought, and artistry. Literature is worthwhile.
Students who read less are also likely to find it more difficult, which is another disincentive. This perpetuates a cycle of students who never develop strong reading skills, and continue to avoid books, in part because they find reading difficult. This same article notes that children who read more do better on comprehension tests, which one would expect.
There are too few people who take the time to read widely and deeply. If you walked back through human history, the people we still talk about today were well read. Even the people you know now, like big-name influencers on YouTube, read and write.
We are now experiencing the outcome of the post-literate society. Fewer people reading and thinking for themselves makes it easier for others, some with bad intentions, to think for them. This allows the same ideas, usually those driven by fear or other base emotions, to proliferate. Our society is coarse, self-oriented, and one where anyone can confidently share their opinion by parroting what they watched or listened to without having done the reading and research themselves.
