[Air-l] The No-Book Report: Skim It and Weep

[Ken Friedman]

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                    (C) 2001 The Washington Post Company
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     http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23370-2001May13.html

   Monday, May 14, 2001; Page C01


      The No-Book Report: Skim It and Weep

      More and More Americans Who Can Read Are Choosing Not To.
      Can We Afford to Write Them Off?

      By Linton Weeks
      Washington Post Staff Writer


  Jeremy Spreitzer probably wouldn't read this story if it weren't about
  him.

  He is an aliterate -- someone who can read, but chooses not to.

  A graduate student in public affairs at Park University in Kansas City,
  Mo., Spreitzer, 25, gleans most of his news from TV. He skims required
  texts, draws themes from dust jackets and, when he absolutely, positively
  has to read something, reaches for the audiobook.

  "I am fairly lazy when it comes to certain tasks," says Spreitzer, a
  long-distance runner who hopes to compete in the 2004 Olympics. "Reading
  is one of them."

  As he grows older, Spreitzer finds he has less time to read. And less
  inclination. In fact, he says, if he weren't in school, he probably
  wouldn't read at all.

  He's not alone. According to the survey firm NDP Group -- which tracked
  the everyday habits of thousands of people through the 1990s -- this
  country is reading printed versions of books, magazines and newspapers
  less and less. In 1991, more than half of all Americans read a half-hour
  or more every day. By 1999, that had dropped to 45 percent.

  A 1999 Gallup Poll found that only 7 percent of Americans were voracious
  readers, reading more than a book a week, while some 59 percent said they
  had read fewer than 10 books in the previous year. Though book clubs seem
  popular now, only 6 percent of those who read belong to one. The number
  of people who don't read at all, the poll concluded, has been rising for
  the past 20 years.

  The reports on changes in reading cut to the quick of American culture.
  We pride ourselves on being a largely literate First World country while
  at the same time we rush to build a visually powerful environment in
  which reading is not required.

  The results are inevitable. Aliteracy is all around. Just ask:

  *  Internet developers. At the Terra Lycos portal design lab in Waltham,
     Mass., researcher William Albert has noticed that the human guinea
  pigs in his focus groups are too impatient to read much. When people look
  up information on the Internet today, Albert explains, they are
  "basically scanning. There's very little actual comprehension that's
  going on." People, Albert adds, prefer to get info in short bursts, with
  bullets, rather than in large blocks of text.

  *  Transportation gurus. Chandra Clayton, who oversees the design of road
     signs and signals for the Virginia Department of Transportation, says,
  "Symbols can quickly give you a message that might take too long to read
  in text." The department is using logos and symbols more and more. When
  it comes to highway safety and getting lifesaving information quickly,
  she adds, "a picture is worth a thousand words."

  *  Packaging designers. "People don't take the time to read anything,"
     explains Jim Peters, editor of BrandPackaging magazine. "Marketers and
  packagers are giving them colors and shapes as ways of communicating."
  For effective marketing, Peters says, "researchers tell us that the
  hierarchy is colors, shapes, icons and, dead last, words."

  Some of this shift away from words -- and toward images -- can be
  attributed to our ever-growing multilingual population. But for many
  people, reading is passe or impractical or, like, so totally unnecessary
  in this day and age.

  To Jim Trelease, author of "The Read-Aloud Handbook," this trend away
  from the written word is more than worrisome. It's wicked. It's tearing
  apart our culture. People who have stopped reading, he says, "base their
  future decisions on what they used to know.

  "If you don't read much, you really don't know much," he says. "You're
  dangerous."


    Losing a Heritage

  "The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who
  cannot read them."
                                        -- Mark Twain

  One thing you can say for illiteracy: It can be identified, nailed down.
  And combated. Scores of programs such as the Greater Washington Literacy
  Council and the International Reading Association are geared toward
  fighting readinglessness in the home, the school and the workplace.

  Aliteracy, on the other hand, is like an invisible liquid, seeping
  through our culture, nigh impossible to pinpoint or defend against. It's
  the kid who spends hours and hours with video games instead of books, who
  knows Sim Cities better than "A Tale of Two Cities."

  It's the thousands of business people who subscribe to executive book
  summaries -- for example, Soundview's easy-to-swallow eight-page
  pamphlets that take simply written management books such as "Secrets of
  Question-Based Selling" by Thomas A. Freese and make them even simpler.

  It's the parent who pops the crummy movie of "Stuart Little" into a
  machine for his kid instead of reading E.B. White's marvelous novel
  aloud. Or the teacher who assigns the made-for-TV movie "Gettysburg"
  instead of the book it was based on, "The Killer Angels" by Michael
  Shaara.

  There may be untold collateral damage in a society that can read but
  doesn't. "So much of our culture is embedded in literature," says Philip
  A. Thompsen, professor of communications at West Chester University in
  West Chester, Pa. Thompsen has been watching the rise of aliteracy in the
  classroom for 20 years, and "students today are less capable of getting
  full value from textbooks than they were 10 years ago."

  He adds that these aliterate students are "missing out on our cultural
  heritage."

  That literature-based past included a reverence for reading, a
  celebration of the works and a worshipful awe of those who wrote.

  To draw you a picture: Where we once deified the lifestyles of writers
  such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, we now fantasize about
  rock-and-roll gods, movie starlets or NBA super-studs (e.g. MTV's
  "Cribs"). The notion of writer-as-culture-hero is dead and gone. Comedic
  monologuists such as Jay Leno or David Letterman have more sex appeal
  than serious fiction writers. The grail quest for the Great American
  Novel has ended; it was a myth after all.

  Where we once drew our mass-cult references from books ("He's a veritable
  Simon Legree"), we now allude to visual works -- a Seinfeld episode (not
  there's anything wrong with that . . .) or "The Silence of the Lambs"
  (the movie, not the book). A recent story in Salon speaks of "learning to
  read a movie."

  Where we once believed that a well-read populace leads to a healthy
  democracy, many people now rely on whole TV broadcast operations built
  around politics and elections. Quick, name a Wolf Blitzer book.

  Non-readers abound. Ask "Politically Incorrect" talk show host Bill
  Maher, who once boasted in print that he hadn't read a book in years. Or
  Noel Gallagher of the rock band Oasis, who has been quoted as saying he'd
  never read a book. You can walk through whole neighborhoods of houses in
  the country that do not contain books or magazines -- unless you count
  catalogues.

  American historian Daniel Boorstin saw this coming. In 1984, while
  Boorstin was serving as librarian of Congress, the library issued a
  landmark report: "Books in Our Future." Citing recent statistics that
  only about half of all Americans read regularly every year, he referred
  to the "twin menaces" of illiteracy and aliteracy.

  "In the United States today," Boorstin wrote, "aliteracy is widespread."

  Several of the articles in the report alluded to the growing number of
  non-readers. In one essay, "The Computer and the Book," Edmund D.
  Pellegrino, a former president of Catholic University who is now a
  bioethicist at Georgetown University, observed: "The computer is simply
  the most effective, efficient and attractive form for transmittal of
  processed information. Added to the other nonbook devices like films,
  tapes, television and the popular media, the computer accelerates the
  atrophy of the intellectual skills acquired for personally reading the
  books from which the information is extracted."


    Reading for Bliss

  Kylene Beers has talked about the evils of aliteracy for so long and so
  loud, she's losing her voice. Today she's in the lecture hall of Oakton
  High School bending the ears of 100 or so middle school teachers.

  If someone graduates from high school and is aliterate, Beers believes,
  that person will probably never become a habitual reader.

  One of the few academics who have written about the phenomenon, Beers, a
  professor of reading at the University of Houston, says there are two
  types of reading: efferent and aesthetic.

  Efferent, which comes from the Latin word efferre (meaning to carry
  away), is purposeful reading, the kind students are taught day after day
  in schools. Efferent readers connect cognitively with the words and plan
  to take something useful from it -- such as answers for a test.

  Aesthetic is reading for the sheer bliss of it, as when you dive deep
  into Dostoevski or get lost in Louisa May Alcott. Aesthetic readers
  connect emotionally to the story. Beers believes that more students must
  be shown the marvels of reading for pleasure.

  On this late afternoon, she is mapping out strategies for teachers who
  hope to engage reluctant middle school readers. Teaching grammar and
  parts of speech, such as dangling participles, is the kiss of death, she
  says. "You don't want to talk about dangling anythings with
  middle-schoolers," she says in her Texas drawl. And the room laughs.

  Aliteracy, she continues, is no laughing matter. Using an overhead
  projector, she explains that aliterate people just don't get it. Unlike
  accomplished readers, aliterates don't understand that sometimes you have
  to read efferently and sometimes you have to read aesthetically; that
  even the best readers occasionally read the same paragraph over and over
  to understand it and that to be a good reader you have to visualize the
  text.

  To engage non-reading students -- and adults -- she proposes reading
  strategies, such as turning a chapter of a hard book into a dramatic
  production or relating tough words to easier words.

  She writes the word "tepid" on the acetate sheet. Then she asks the
  audience to supply other words that describe water temperature. "Hot,"
  someone calls out. "Freezing," somebody else says. Others suggest: cold,
  warm and boiling. Beers arranges the words in a linear fashion, from the
  coldest word, "freezing," to the hottest, "boiling." "Tepid" falls in the
  middle of the list. This method, she says, will help reluctant readers to
  connect words they don't know to words they do know. "Aliterates," she
  tells the teachers, "don't see relationships."

  Apparently, teachers don't always see the relationships either. Jim
  Trelease is concerned that teachers do not read. The aliteracy rate among
  teachers, he says, is about the same, 50 percent, as among the general
  public.

  There is some good news on the reading front, according to Trelease and
  others. The Harry Potter series has turned on a lot of young readers and
  megabookstores, such as Barnes & Noble and Borders, are acrawl with
  people.

  But there is plenty of bad news, too. Lots of aliterates, according to
  Trelease, say they just don't have time to read anymore. "The time
  argument is the biggest hoax of all," he says. According to time studies,
  we have more leisure time than ever. "If people didn't have time, the
  malls would be empty, cable companies would be broke, video stores would
  go out of business. It's not a time problem, it's a value problem. You
  have 50 percent in the country who don't value reading."

  Like Beers, Trelease believes that youngsters should be encouraged to
  read aesthetically. Reading aloud to children, according to Trelease and
  other reading specialists, is the single best way to ensure that someone
  will become a lifelong reader.

  "Even Daniel Boorstin wasn't born wanting to read," Trelease says.
  "Michael Jordan wasn't born wanting to play basketball. The desire has to
  be planted."


    Surfing Through Grad School

  Trelease and Beers and others are scrambling for ways to engage
  aliterates. For all kinds of reasons. "What aliteracy does is breed
  illiteracy," Beers explains. "If you go through school having learned to
  read and then you leave school not wanting to read, chances are you won't
  put your own children into a reading environment."

  "What you have to do is play hardball," says Trelease. He suggests
  running public awareness campaigns on TV. "That's where the aliterates
  are."

  Trelease says we should try to eradicate aliteracy in the way we went
  after tobacco. We should let people know, Trelease says, "what the
  consequences are to your family and children if you don't read."

  "Aliteracy may be a significant problem today," says Philip Thompsen.
  "But on the other hand, a narrow view of literacy -- one that defines
  literacy as the ability to read verbal texts -- may be a significant
  problem as well."

  Many of the messages that we have to interpret in day-to-day life,
  Thompsen says, "use multiple communication media. I think it is important
  to realize that as our society becomes more accustomed to using
  multimedia messages, we must also expand our thinking about what it means
  to be 'literate.' "

  Olympic hopeful Jeremy Spreitzer plans to become a teacher and maybe go
  into politics someday. For now, he's just trying to get through graduate
  school.

  He watches a lot of television. "I'm a major surfer," he says. He watches
  the History Channel, A&E, Turner Classic Movies and all of the news
  stations.

  "I'm required to do a lot of reading," he says. "But I do a minimum of
  what I need to do."

  But how do you get through grad school without reading? Spreitzer is
  asked.

  He gives an example. One of his required texts is the recently published
  "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community" by Robert
  Putnam. In the book, Putnam argues, among other things, that television
  has fragmented our society.

  Spreitzer thumbed through the book, dipped into a few chapters and spent
  a while "skipping around" here and there.

  He feels, however, that he understands Putnam and Putnam's theories as
  well as if he had read the book.

  How is that? he is asked.

  Putnam, he explains, has been on TV a lot. "He's on the news all the
  time," Spreitzer says. "On MSNBC and other places. Those interviews with
  him are more invaluable than anything else."


     http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23370-2001May13.html
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                    (C) 2001 The Washington Post Company
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