Students who don't read anymore

Norman Mailer recently addressed the precipitous decline in reading across the nation as a national crisis. In an article entitled "One Idea" in the January 23, 2005 issue of Parade, he writes:

If the desire to read diminishes, so does one's ability to read. The search for a culprit does not have to go far. There are confirming studies all over academia and the media that too many hours are devoted each day to the tube. Television is seen as the culprit, since the ability to read well is directly related to one's ability to learn. If it is universally understood that the power to concentrate while reading is the royal road to knowledge, what may not be perceived as clearly is how much concentration itself is a species of psychic strength. It can be developed or it can go soft in much the manner that body muscle can be built up or allowed to go slack. The development of physical ability is in direct relation to use. Reading offers its analogy. When children become interested in an activity, their concentration is firm--until it is interrupted. Sixty years ago, children would read for hours. Their powers of concentration developed as naturally as breathing. Good readers became very good readers, even as men and women who go in for weight-lifting will bulk up. The connection between loving to read and doing well in school was no mystery to most students.

I've sensed a growing problem in academe for years. In the college where I teach, I ask a couple of students to meet with me after every class for five minutes in order to ask them where they're from, what they're majoring in, what their interests are, and if they have any concerns about the course. The last question I ask them is: "What is the last book you have read for your own enjoyment and not because it was assigned for some class?" Twenty years ago, most of my students had little trouble remembering a book they had recently read; and if they couldn't remember, they were embarrassed and apologetic. During the last ten years, the number of these students has risen precipitously. Not only are they unapologetic. They are not even the least bit embarrassed when the cannot remember the title of a single book they have ever read on their own. They simply respond: "I don't read," as though they were describing their disinterest in a particular sport.

Syndicated columnist E. Ray Walker, in a January 27, 2005 article in the Fort Wayne News Sentinel ("Rx for America: Reading") commenting on a country of non-readers losing its mind, remarks:

Just last summer a National Endowment for the Arts survey found a dramatic decrease in Americans who read literature (novels, plays, poetry, short stories), with more than half -- HALF! -- of Americans not reading for pleasure. The survey found an overall decline of 10 percentage points in literary readers from 1982 to 2002, a loss of 20 million potential readers.

Said NEA Chairman Dan Gioia: "The decline in reading among every segment of the adult population reflects a general collapse in advanced literacy. To lose this human capacity--and all the diverse benefits it fosters--impoverishes both cultural and civic life."

While the NEA survey found reading declines in all demographic groups, it was particularly dramatic among those 18 to 24 years old. Among this group, the decline was 55 percent greater than that of the total adult population. At the current rate of loss among the young, literary reading will virtually disappear in 50 years, the NEA warns. That's not exactly reassuring.

All of this raises all those old questions about the effects of television, which we used to call the "idiot box." One of the first books to seriously question the whole television ethos was Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978). Subsequent contributions include

• Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1986);
• Jane M. Healy's Endangered Minds: Why Children Don't Think And What We Can Do About It (1999);
• Cheryl Pawlowski's Glued to the Tube: The Threat of Television Addiction to Today's Family (2000); and
• Marie Winn's The Plug-In Drug: Television, Computers and Family Life (2002).

Our family has had a policy of not owning a television for decades. I think it has paid off. In fact, we often wonder out loud how people ever find time for television in their lives. Norman Mailer doesn't go so far as to call for the elimination of television. But he does see the rapid-fire ads as a major culprit in the declining capacity of children to concentrate. He concludes his article thus:

If we want to have the best of all possible worlds, we had better recognize that we cannot have all the worlds. I believe that television commercials have got to go. Let us pay directly for what we enjoy on television rather than pass the spiritual cost on to our children and their children.