The Academic Approach®

One does not have to be a suspicious Luddite to be engaged by the argument offered in Mark Bauerlein’s book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Penguin 2008).  Essentially, Mr Bauerlein argues that American high school students, despite their unprecedented access to information, wallow in ignorance because their attachment to all things digital has eroded “their attention spans and their analytic abilities.”  As Charles McGrath puts it in his recent New York Times Book Review piece entitled “Growing Up for Dummies”: ”most high school students … don’t read, they don’t go to museums or get involved in community life, they don’t do much homework…and they know next to nothing.”  Of course, McGrath points out, we are all familiar with the stories of those young überachievers with the perfect standardized test scores, straight-A transcripts, who play first violin in the local youth symphony, work at a homeless shelter, and edit the school newspaper, that is, the stories of those adolescents who have somehow transcended their generation’s slow decline into dumbness.  It does not take a particularly sophisticated reader to recognize that, like all heroic narratives since Homer, these narratives are not about the mere mortals we live with, rather they are about a culturally specific, heroic ideal towards which we (or, at least, our college-bound children) would strive.  Reality, of course, presents us with something very different, something less heroic.Perhaps an anecdote will help clarify.  The majority of my students were always dumbstruck and tickled by my innocence when, as an English teacher at an independent college preparatory school, I used to ask them on the first day back what they had read over the summer, that is, what they had read on their own, for pleasure, during their ten-week vacation.  Guffaws all around answered my question.  Of course, I was always aware of just how fraught the very posing of such a question was within the social space of the high school English classroom with its specific, social culture so pervasively characterized by the same smug and strident anti-intellectualism (exemplified by our current President) that dominates the broader culture in which these students are immersed so thoroughly and thoughtlessly.Alfie Cohn offers a similar anecdote in a passage where he reflects on the question he himself has posed: “What are we doing to our students in the name of college prep?” A friend of his who is a college counselor at an elite prep school with a stellar record of placing its students in the very best of the very elite colleges has the following exchange with one of the school’s top students: ““Why don’t we start with some books that had an impact on you,” suggested the counselor. “Tell me about something you’ve read for pleasure – not for an assignment.” A painful silence followed. There were no books to be listed; the very concept of reading for pleasure was unfamiliar to this stellar student.”As revealing and disturbing as such anecdotes may be, statistics may reveal and disturb even more.  For example, take these numbers from the massive study by Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation entitled “The Teen Media Juggling Act: The Implications of Media Multitasking Among American Youth”

• Middle and high school students spend an average 2:08 hours per week with reading as the primary activity; 35% of those students are multitasking with other media while thus engaging in the primary activity of reading.
• Middle and high school students spend an average 16:34 hours per week watching t.v. as the primary activity; 17% of those students are multitasking with other media while thus engaging in the primary activity of watching t.v.

No doubt, few are surprised to read that middle and high school students watch t.v. approximately 8 times as many hours per week as they read.  However, who isn’t struck by the significant discrepancy between the level of multi-tasking distraction that these students subject themselves to when reading as opposed to when watching t.v.   These students are twice as likely to distract themselves with multitasking while reading than while watching t.v.  I must admit that, when watching Simpsons reruns on t.v., I am probably speaking on the phone, reading the NY Times, or fumbling with a beer-bottle opener about 17% of the time.  However–and some may call me old fashioned and stuck in my archaic, readerly ways–when I read, I mono-task (if I may coin a term).  I allow myself to be engaged by the text and nothing but the text.I humbly submit that parents and educators model and encourage such reading, not so much as part a college-admissions battle plan but instead as an essential step in the direction of being able to honestly and intelligently answer the simple question that intellectually curious, life-long learners like to ask of others: Have you read any good books lately?