COMMENTARY: Students in the Grip of Post-Literacy
By Jennifer MosesThe Providence Journal
Baton Rouge, LA (SHNS) -- According to a recent spate of articles, it's harder to get into college than ever, and not just at the elite end of the spectrum. It's harder in part because students, panicked, are typically making upward of 10 applications; more to the point, these same panicked students, particularly those interested in attending elite institutions, are doing everything they can to polish their high-school "resumes," including (and especially) spending their fun time sitting in SAT-preparation classes.
The subject is very much on my mind because my eldest son, Sam, is a junior in high school, and it's all he can think about. As he recently pointed out to me, if I were applying to college now, not only would I not be accepted into my alma mater (Tufts), but also, I probably wouldn't be admitted to any of the other (two) colleges that sent me acceptance letters.
But all the frenzy over college admissions obscures something a lot more troubling: namely, that today's high-school graduates are in fact more poorly equipped for college than students of previous generations, and the reason is simple: They don't read. It's not that they can't read, mind you -- Americans on the whole are the most literate society on earth, with illiteracy rates steadily dropping. But today's students, like their elders, are in the grip of what I call post-literacy. True, they have board scores that would make Einstein weep with envy, varsity letters, and experience digging drainage ditches in the Third World -- not to mention perfect grades and teeth -- but without having put in the time snuggling up with a good book, they're intellectually handicapped.
This is not something I stumbled upon all on my own. A former college mentor of my husband's recently told me that though student test scores and grade-point averages are way up at the university to which he has devoted his professional life, on the whole today's freshmen aren't really prepared for college at all.
The reason, he says, is not just that they've spent their high-school "downtime" furiously building their resumes. It is also because of the information onslaught and how they are taught.
It's almost as if, with our current reliance on the Internet and other technological sources of information, students can only digest information in tiny, fragmentary bits. The problem with fragmentary bits is that there's no context, no glue, no narrative structure to grapple with. And without story, without plot line and characterization, motive and psychology, there's no meaning.
My brother-in-law, who until recently was dean of students at a small New England college, reported much the same. "They can identify celebrities," he said, "and do wonders with multi-media presentations. It's just that they don't understand anything, and can't write worth a damn."
I don't mean to pick on students, who, after all, are kids, meaning that what they do or don't do is largely a matter of what the adult world tells them to do. Nor do I blame technology per se. When my seventh-grade twins come home with homework that amounts to little more than cutting-and-pasting from the Internet, I'm hardly encouraged, but the Net also holds out the world's best hope for the continued exchange of free ideas, with online discussion groups, bloggers, kvetchers and other sources of uncensored ideas.
But we're paying a price for all this ready information. The ancient parental call to "go and read a good book" seems as quaint as the Charleston. And it's not just kids who aren't cuddling up with a good book. Surely I can't be the only person to have noticed that most people, when they do read, read junk. But the publishing world isn't the problem, either, as all kinds of worthy projects, including startlingly beautiful works of new fiction, poetry and nonfiction, are published, and reviewed, side by side with the tidal wave of chick lit, bodice rippers and guides to instant success.
Cultural mirrors aside, what's really troubling about post-literacy isn't that too few people delve into complex works of history, economics, biography or literature -- not to mention know how to recite the Prologue to "The Canterbury Tales," parse a Shakespearean sonnet or tackle the later works of Henry James -- but, rather, that we as a nation of citizens are letting our brains turn into big soggy masses of gray goop. And when your brains turn to mush, it's hard to tease out meaning, or discern hard and often ugly facts amidst mountains of spin and image making.
In short, how can we make wise collective decisions if we live in an interior world of sound bites, information fragments and images? Thus, we've all but lost our ability to say what we mean. How much longer are we going to let the power of language be hijacked?
To put it plainly: Democracy needs readers. Want to show your patriotism?
Forget the flag-waving, and take your kids to the library instead.
Jennifer Moses is a Baton Rouge-based writer.
Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.