Another Foray into Tech and Literacy: Contra The New Yorker

by Clay Burell

Published February 04, 2009 @ 05:00AM PT

Having a Ph.D. doesn't necessarily make you out of date - but in my experience, it seems to increase the odds.

Case in point: my tongue-in-ballistic-cheek rebuttal to the Science Daily summary of the "tech versus critical thinking and literacy" study triggered a challenge from an education professor specializing in literacy. She challenged my lack of  "balance" in the post - a rebuttal isn't supposed to be balanced, in my book, but anyway - and recommended I read a New Yorker essay that, presumably, would set me straight.

The good Doctor's challenge was all well and good. But it was sent in an email, instead of as a comment to the post. An email. How 1990s.

I don't belittle email in any "I'm hip because I'm with it: I blog" sense. I belittle it because, in terms of literacy and critical thinking, email is impotent in comparison with comment threads and forums. Only I could read the email challenge; you couldn't.

That cheats everybody.

It cheats the education professor who mailed it to me, because she restricts discussion of her idea to two people - her and me - instead of to any and all people, now and evermore, who could have responded to her challenge if she'd posted it in the comments thread. For a literacy professor like herself, this should be a vital point of interest, because it has obvious applications to classroom practice. Emails kill open debate; comment threads water it. Lesson? Use comment threads to extend classroom discussion beyond the confines of the clock on the classroom wall, and beyond the shyness and/or deliberative limits of the students in the class. (By that I mean to point to the shy student who won't share ideas in spoken discussions, and the more dilatory student who needs more time to mull things over in order to formulate a position.)

It also cheats me and you, since none of us can benefit from the multiple inputs and insights that come in open comment threads.

Anyway, I followed her email to the New Yorker, and felt "deja vu all over again" as I read. The essay makes many of the same category-errors as the Science Daily post about "books," "reading," and "technology." And much of its hand-wringing could be turned to hand-clapping, if only it were more informed of new literacy potentials unleashed by the explosion of web-based reading and writing tools.

So here we go:

Why People Won't Stop Reading after Books Follow the Scroll into History

The title of Caleb Crain's New Yorker essay shows the weakness of the thesis already:

"Twilight of the Books: What will life be like if people stop reading?"

Here we go again: "books" equal "reading."

People won't stop reading when books (and magazines like The New Yorker) disappear. I'm reading the essay online, for example, and writing all of these notes in response online too (see the earlier Diigo tutorial).

Crain opens with a lot of studies and statistics from the last century that show reading's decline. This isn't surprising, since the invention of television obviously sucked us all into tuberous, remote-clutching stupors for the five-plus decades since the 1950s. But that's changing, which Crain fails to emphasize. More on that later.

But Crain makes a sneaky turn when he shifts the frame of this "decline of reading" theme to that of a decline of reading "creative literature." Now it pains me to say this a bit, because I'm both a teacher and a lover of literature, but the history and politics teacher in me makes it easier to say: Why does Crain privilege "creative literature"?  Why is "creative literature" more important to "civilization" than non-fiction? Why is Keats more important than the Constitution? I don't see it.

Crain goes on to note a Department of Education study showing a decline in the "ability" to read between 1992 and 2003. Interestingly, this didn't hold for fourth- and eighth-graders, whose scores improved "moderately." It only held for high school seniors.

Crain is not blaming technology here for this high school literacy hell, bless him (though he later blames television, which gets no objections from me), but it's worth pausing to ask: why would high school literacy hit a wall because of television, when primary and middle school students don't exist in a tv-less vacuum, and manage to make literacy gains?

Maybe parental control is greater for younger students, granted, than for high schoolers. But there's another difference between early and middle years' English/language arts education, on the one hand, and that of secondary/high school, on the other, that deserves a place in the suspect line-up: the nature of high school English classes.

Sir Ken Robinson, in his wry and provocative "Do Schools Kill Creativity?" TED Talk video, nails the issue when he asks:

Did you ever notice that high schools and colleges seem to exist in order to try to turn every student into a professor?

(If you're an educator and haven't seen this, it's hugely influential, and for good reason. Treat yourself to the link above.)

My own experience as a high school AP Literature teacher prompts an uncomfortable affirmative. I don't want my students to get the impression that a life-long love of literature means a life sentence of writing or discussing dry analyses of plot, theme, character, or symbolism - "And remember, don't use the first person" - about the great works. But the AP examination forces me to do just this. The students pass or fail the course based on their accomplishment in this academic exercise, to riff off Wordsworth, of "murdering to dissect." (Don't scream until you hear that I love writing the stuff myself, but love different modes of response even more.)

So could this decline in high school literacy correlate to the academicizing of literary studies that happens in high schools? Could high schools be turning students off of literature - by trying to turn them into literature professors?

Crain moves straight to a discussion of this question that seems to put him squarely at odds with Robinson and me:

The steepest declines [in a Department of Education study of high school seniors between 1992 and 2005] were in “reading for literary experience”—the kind that involves “exploring themes, events, characters, settings, and the language of literary works,” in the words of the department’s test-makers.

Where to start. How about "the department's test-makers"? Who were they? Some of the NCLB standardized-testing beneficiaries, many of whose billions-of-dollars products - Reading First, anyone? - have been shown to be of dubious quality? Or were they cut from the mold of the ETS and the College Board, whose SAT and AP exams measure speed-read-and-speed-bubble test-taking skills as much as anything else? And anyway - have schools ever succeeded in producing life-long lovers of literature? I'd love it if they did, but studies Crain himself cites show it's been a losing battle for over fifty years, again.

I'll close this part with a question: Beyond the external factors Crain points to - television above all - in the decline of "literary reading" among high school students, can we look closer to home at the internal factors relating to how literature is taught, and how reading is assessed - and discuss reforms that might improve the situation?

And to return to the earlier question, do tests trying to measure "reading for literary experience" measure the most important type of reading?

More soon in Part 2 - because Crain's argument gets more interesting, in a different way, from here on out.

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And here's another little tutorial on the "extract annotations" feature of Diigo that I used to write this post. Another techno-literacy eye-opener for record.

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Photo by leah the librarian