Who is to Blame for the Illiteracy Crisis? All of Us

A recent article in the Atlantic magazine set off alarm bells in various corners of the internet.  The article, entitled “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” made note of the fact that large majorities of students at what used to be thought of as America’s most prestigious colleges – Columbia and Berkeley are mentioned specifically – are no longer capable of reading entire books.  The article was met with a great deal of hand-wringing and outrage, while those of us who have labored in America’s literature classrooms for years were left wondering what took everyone so long to figure out this was the situation.

The most common reaction I observed was to cast blame on the “school system,” for its failure to foster appropriate reading habits in students.  Typical complaints lamented that we are “systematically failing” students, that “K-12 is broken,” and that “they” (that is, the schools) are making kids stupid.  The article itself offered evidence of the culpability of middle and high school instruction, pointing out that most literature instruction that takes place at these levels involves the reading and analyzing of short passages of text, in conformity to the types of assessments students face on standardized tests.  The obsession with preparing students for success on these tests has caused schools to neglect the protracted forms of concentration involved in reading novels or substantive philosophical texts.

I have zero desire to defend our school system.  I take second place to no one in my contempt for the whole thing.  I got into classical education precisely because my discontent with the state of affairs I had witnessed in our standard educational model left me convinced that no serious instruction could take place within that model.  The fascination with meretricious theories and gimmicks, at the expense of hard work and high standards, are the defining characteristics of the instructional model on offer outside of the classical world.  I have witnessed the disastrous effects of this model, and seen the declining expectations placed on students first hand.  So I wholeheartedly join in the outrage directed at our school system in the wake of this article, and affirm all of the charges about its failings that have been leveled at it.  And yet….

The dismaying thing about the general reaction to the news that college students are no longer capable of reading an entire book is the strangely myopic tenor of it all.  It is as if people think that schools are monastic institutions, constructed on far-off distant mountain tops and impervious to all the cultural forces raging in the city below.  This is not the case.  Schools do not exist apart from the societies whose young people they train.  They are not buffered from the cultural forces that prevail in the world outside the classroom.  The readers of that Atlantic article hurling invective at our schools seem curiously uninterested in the cultural forces exerting the kinds of pressures that have lowered the quality of instruction in those schools.

In fact, the article mentions one of these forces – namely, technology.  The ever-beckoning distraction of the screen has undoubtedly eroded young people’s ability to concentrate for extended periods of time, a fact that will be confirmed by anyone who has worked with children in recent years.  Equally undeniable is the fact that changes in reading practice and expectations in recent years have very much resulted from an attempt to account for these declining powers of concentration.  I know this for a fact; I am as committed as anyone could be to the teaching and preservation of real literary study, and yet I have had to make all sorts of adjustments and compromises in the way I present material to accommodate the restructured brains that we now routinely encounter in the classroom.

Well, who is to blame for this state of affairs?  Not the “school system,” certainly.  Who is placing ipads in front of children not yet two-years old whenever they are put in their stroller?  Who routinely hands those same children a phone at the dinner table rather than engaging in conversation?  Who allows their teenagers to stay up until 2 in the morning watching Netflix?  These are not unusual practices; they are quite ubiquitous.  It is only willful obtuseness which could allow anyone to pretend that this surfeit of technological distraction is not deeply implicated in the declining literacy of children, and yet that surfeit is being enabled in these children’s homes. 

We might ponder for a moment what is not happening in those homes as well.  It has become less and less common for parents to read to children.  It has become less and less common for parents to read themselves, thus setting an example for their children.  It is uncommon for homes to foster the quiet and stillness necessary for private reading.  It is uncommon for families to converse at the dinner table, thus instilling in children’s minds the patterns of thought and language that serve as the foundation for academic work.  Again, it is absurd to pretend that these changes are not part of the explanation for the decline in student literacy.

Moreover, the failure of schools to uphold serious standards is not entirely attributable to those institutions alone.  Yes, progressive educators have implemented ridiculous grading and disciplinary policies in recent years, like assigning half-credit for work that is never handed in or “restorative justice” models of discipline which allow recalcitrant students to run roughshod over the learning environment of a school before facing any real consequences.  But this is not the whole story. 

What exactly do people think happens when a teacher actually does try to uphold serious academic standards in a modern school?  What happens, for instance, when she assigns a failing grade to a student who does not do the reading?  Quite often, what happens is that the parent of that student calls up the administration and starts raising hell.  Even if the administrator is supportive of the teacher – which is definitely not always the case – the stress of having to march into the boss’ office to justify your grading practices is enough to make any young teacher question whether their commitment to academic rigor was really worth it.  Multiply such episodes a few times in a young teacher’s career, and he or she will quickly realize that job security in a modern school is much better preserved by “going with the flow.”  Multiply such episodes through school after school and then you have part of your answer as to why instructional standards have continued to drop within our “system.”  

There is just no way to talk honestly about the declining literacy of students without addressing the changed habits of those students and their families.  There is no way to formulate a proper etiology of even the worst, most destructive policies of modern schools without acknowledging the influence on those policies of pressures emanating from outside of schools.  Yet even once we account for these factors, we are still very far from getting at the root of why American children are no longer capable of reading a book.

In what sense are we as a people a literary people?  In what sense do we as a people value literature?  Who are our great living authors?  What have been the great literary events of our lifetime, akin to the Certame Coronario or the mob flooding the docks of New York to get their hands on the latest chapter of “The Old Curiosity Shop?” Does it bother a single American – does it occur to a single American – that there are obviously no answers to these questions?  In a larger sense, what value can we be said as a people to ascribe to the life of the mind?   In what ways have we organized our communal life together to afford time and energy to the consideration of man’s abiding questions?  How willing have we shown ourselves to curb the acquisitiveness that is so central to our national character for the sake of the leisure which provides the sole basis for learned pursuits?  What about our culture – what evidence do we find in our music or drama of our concern for eloquence, for wisdom, for beauty? 

Does anybody really suppose that schools established in the midst of such a culture are not bound to reflect the same utilitarianism, the same indifference to the cultivation of the mind, that characterizes that culture?  Does anybody really believe that American schools are going to be anything other than a reflection of the American people?  In this sense alone, we might say that our children have learned a great deal.  Sure, they have not learned how to read a book from cover to cover, but they have thoroughly absorbed the philistinism and single-minded pursuit of material comfort that their country has been pertinaciously teaching them since birth. 

The revelation that students at our most reputed universities are no longer capable of reading entire books should fill us all with horror and dread.  And it should make us all ask very serious questions about how our society arrived at such a state of affairs.  But the inveterate American habit of pointing the accusing finger for every one of our social ills at some phantom “they,” our habitual resort to mythological language about “the system,” invariably serves to shield us from acknowledging our own culpability in the very evils we bemoan.  The impoverished state of our children’s minds is all of our faults, because all of us have failed to prioritize the cultivation of those minds above everything else, as it was our duty to do.  Only once we acknowledge that disconcerting fact can we even begin to talk sensibly about what is to be done.