Three from WP's Outlook Section

Three related op-ed pieces in the Outlook section of today's Washington Post caught my attention today:

1. "The Dumbing Of America" by Susan Jacoby

   Jacoby has written The Age of American Unreason, taking off from Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. In her op-ed piece, she decries new trends in the United States:
   a. the substitution of watching video for reading,
   b. the erosion of general knowledge (people don't know geography or languages), and
   c. increasing arrogance about that lack of knowledge.



2. "The End of Literacy? Don't Stop Reading" by Howard Gardner

   Gardner agrees that we are reading less, but suggests that the use of media has changed radically in the past, and the current change is just part of that long term process. He suggests that the ability to read and write will continue to be important, that the standards of "good writing" will continue to evolve, and that new forms of literacy will arise (and become important to our evolving culture. Still, he recognizes that we will give up important capabilities if we lose the knack of reading complex books.

3. "Not Reading An Iota in America" by Randy Salzman

   Salzman recounts an experience in Juvenal Court where a large number of people sat for hours with nothing to read. He recognizes that one of the gaps between mainstream culture in the United States and the underclass culture is that the people in the latter culture do not read even as much as do average Americans.

Comment: The authors are of course correct in recognizing a reduction in reading in the United States, and I fear a dumbing down of the U.S. public in recent decades.

I am old enough that I can look back in my own life. As a child I went to the movies once a week, read a lot, and listened to the radio a lot. I often read while listening to the radio. Those were the days before television. I was 13 before there was a telephone in my house. I used both the school library and the public library, and there were books in my home. We took a daily paper.

In the television age, I watched television, went to fewer movies, listened to radio but only in the car, and continued to read. I often read while the television was on, multitasking.

In the age of the personal computer, I continue to read (using my Kindle now as well as books), and subscribe to a newspaper and several magazines. But I spend hours a day on the Internet. Email and blogging tend to substitute for a lot of conversation. I continue to multitask (the TV is on in the background as I write this, occasionally consulting the articles cited above via the Internet). I still teach at the university level, and I belong to a book club (as I did a very long time ago.)

I note that I remember very little of the material I so patiently absorbed during decades of reading complex materials. I now am very demanding that the things I read compress their key points, and I love the Internet format. Note that I have just introduced the three articles above, linking them with hypertext. The interested reader can read them in depth, while others can just skip down the page.

We are already pushing "information literacy" which includes both the ability to find information quickly in cyberspace and to evaluate the trustworthiness of that information. There is numeracy, which is I suppose a specific aspect of quantitative literacy, or the ability to utilize quantitative data and tools. There is scientific and technological literacy. How about political literacy, cultural literacy, and geographical literacy? I am sure we will identify other forms of literacy in the future, and indeed demand that our children become literate in these new ways.

Perhaps we will need a "multitasking literacy" which includes the ability to include important content in the media to which we are attending, and to attend sufficiently to the most important content to absorb what we need.

None of the three authors discusses "wisdom". The president of the United States literally has millions of people working to provide him with the information he needs, with great accuracy and clear information on its reliability, in the most convenient format for absorption and utilization. He should gain more knowledge in a month than most of us can absorb in a year. However, it takes what we call wisdom to use that knowledge well, and to make good decisions for the welfare of our nation and our world. JAD