“Kirk: You mean the profanity? That’s simply the way they talk here. Nobody pays attention to you unless you swear every other word. You’ll find it in all the literature of the period.
Spock: For example?
Kirk: Oh the neglected works of Jacqueline Susan. The novels of Harold Robbins…
Spock: Ah. The Giants. “

I read Moby Dick for the third time in 2001 after recalling the following passage from Chapter 1:

And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand program of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:

Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States

Whaling Voyage by one Ishmael

BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN

The point of reading historical literary works is not that they are exciting or even particularly interesting to most people, but that they exemplify the state of art of literature at various stages and in various cultures. I’m sure that there are any number of people who find the works of Homer or Dante or Melville or any number of other major figures intrinsically fascinating, as I find Shakespeare, for an example, but the great majority of students suffer through these works for the same educational purpose as introductory courses in statistics or botany, i.e., to gain a foundation for further study and appreciation.

I only mentioned “Expectations” because it was a joke around my house for years that, if one couldn’t sleep, just try to read a few pages of that book, and you’d be out for the night. My recent college grad swore it was better than Nyquil.

More seriously, it seems to me that the problem isn’t with which books are assigned, or whether or not TV shows are too bouncy and fun for teachers to compete against. (A view my wife and I have held for decades) The true crux of the problem may very well be that the current 19th century industrial model of mass education is finally reaching its expiration date, and an entirely new, or at least extensively remodeled, system will have to be developed to replace it.

Whatever the future holds, two predictions are locks—1) the educational/academic establishment will fight any systemic reforms tooth and nail; 2)the current school generation will, as parents and grandparents, lament the falling standards of education for their children, and despair that such an ill educated group could ever deal with the critical issues of their time.

Entrenched administrative organizations always resist any meaningful changes in the way they make their living, and elders have been tut-tutting over the failings of the youngsters since those Egyptian writings of several thousand years ago decrying the ignorance and blasphemous disrespect of the up and coming generation.

For the record, I think the kids coming up will make us all very, very proud before they’re done. I only hope I can stick around to see some of it. I won’t ever walk on Mars, but one of my grandchildren’s kids might.

This is not just true in the mass media. Take a look at any teacher’s guide – emphasis is always on “making learning FUN!”

Test

The Victorian Literature that got me fired up was the lively dialectic between Newman, Arnold, and Huxley. To be in a classroom questioning the very foundations of that class…THAT is fun!

The Internet is much more active than a book. In fact, there are games you can play, where everything is read, and yet it is extremely active. Boys love these games. Prior to Runescape, I played what is called a MUD. Mine was Multi Users in Middle Earth or MUME. It was a living Tolkien world that was entirely experienced as text. It really turned me on to computers and now I can support myself, which I could not do with my knowledge of literature. Though I confess, I find Philosophy much more helpful and to my tastes than English Lit.

I hope I got the cite code correct. Very odd to have a containing tag with nothing to contain.

I taught High School. Grades 9-12 all major ethnic/racial students in my class. As a matter of fact, we had fun. The more fun I had, the more fun the students had. Learning SHOULD be fun. If it isn’t, someone isn’t very creative. But what I want to say here is that MY manual said “KEEP DISCIPLINE IN THE CLASSROOM”. I did that as well. When learning is fun, who needs discipline?

I know this was a lot to read and rambling. If you didn’t read it, I don’t blame you.

“I didn’t get it when I was 15, and I don’t get it 45 years later. Unlike Barry, I wouldn’t read it even if I were kidnapped by FARC. There would have to be something better to do, like counting the hairs on the back of my hand.”

I completely agree. I read hundreds of web pages, novels and technical manuals each and every single week but I cannot bring myself to read “Moby Dick”.

I get 10 pages into it and it’s just revolting to me.

“The trend that is scary and weird is that children no longer seem rewarded, inspired, or motivated by the act of learning, the idea of knowing more than they used to, the benefits of understanding more deeply. Whether the increased exposure to MORE information will ultimately outweigh the lack of desire to understand and “dig in,” only time will tell. Will greater breadth of knowledge and less depth be good or bad?”

Actually I think the internet is self-reinforcing. Take a good hard look at any reasonably serious discussion. It becomes easily apparent that form and substance in writing style is both important and impressive. People who write in semi-literate forms generally aren’t taken very seriously and those that show excessive ignorance get schooled regularly. In such an environment you don’t have 1 teacher and 40 students. Instead you’ve got 1 student and hundreds of potential teachers.

A classic example are discussion forums dedicated to software development. Invariably there will be new users who come in and ask relatively repetitive questions and are shown the way to a solution. They return more and more, are inoculated with the community’s standards and often find themselves at a future point as the hoary oldster.

*shrug* Frankly I don’t see the downside.

I didn’t get it when I was 15, and I don’t get it 45 years later. Unlike Barry, I wouldn’t read it even if I were kidnapped by FARC. There would have to be something better to do, like counting the hairs on the back of my hand.

Frankly the only thing that I’ve seen change in my reading habits is that I’m far less forgiving of bad, unwieldy or excessive prose.

Make your point, get on with it and don’t clutter everything up with pointless nonsense.

One class of “media” that has evolved in recent years is the “tunnels of oppression” which have become popular on some university campuses. These generally seem intended to inculcate particular ethical and political opinions, rather than to encourage connected thinking. I believe they represent “sensorial interfaces” in the terminology of the Stephenson book referred to in the post linked in the comment above.

“Tunnels of oppression” have been extensively discussed by Erin O’Connor.

I do not mean to suggest that students shouldn’t be exposed to Dickens. However, if the objective is to teach them to read books somewhat more difficult than “Go Dog Go!” then there are several ways to approach this. Is it so horrible to consider requiring them to read works that they might find relevant, at least with some coaching?

Kirk Parker…the Morlocks and Eloi make an appearance in my post Metaphors, Interfaces, and Thought.

Is it not possible to teach a generation to struggle through a novel that will make reading seem a bit more attractive”

There’s a REASON they proudly say, “I don’t read books.” If they’d run across books that gave them an inkling of why they might want to read them, maybe at least some of them might choose to do so. Is anyone helping to evangelize? If these kids need to hear the Gospel of Literature, then how is harping on their disliking Dickens going to spread the Good News, here?

Look, Dickens is neither the only writer in the English language, nor the best. His books are essentially obsolete pop lit.

My parents went to school well after the ballpoint pen became commonplace. They were forced to use dip pens. Of course, little girls’ only dresses were ruined, ink bottles became tools for practical jokes, children were punished for spilling ink, and all for what, exactly? To assuage the teachers’ perverse need to subject their students to whatever difficulties they’d experienced as children? Wouldn’t the students’ time in school been better spent learning something more significant than the proper use of obsolete writing implements?

This is not just true in the mass media. Take a look at any teacher’s guide – emphasis is always on “making learning FUN!”

As long as 25 years ago, I heard a Latin teacher in my high school state that, “because of TV,” he had to resort to theatrics in the classroom to keep his students’ interest. That would have been very shortly after our community even GOT cable (before, it was just the 3 channels, and one of those was fuzzy).

The trend that is scary and weird is that children no longer seem rewarded, inspired, or motivated by the act of learning, the idea of knowing more than they used to, the benefits of understanding more deeply. Whether the increased exposure to MORE information will ultimately outweigh the lack of desire to understand and “dig in,” only time will tell. Will greater breadth of knowledge and less depth be good or bad?

What happens to a technologically based society when most of its members can’t or won’t deal with anything complex in written form? Or, for that matter, in any form?

Maybe this.

Different media of communication (and I include here the channel of open-air face-to-face communication) provide different experiences. The masterpiece on the subject is Joshua Meyrowitz’s No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior.

Different media require different levels of concentration and processing. Get used to a fast medium, and you will be training yourself away from the slow. Get used to impersonal experiences, and you will lost some of your social skills. Do all your reading on line in five-minute bursts, and you will be less able to concentrate on a long book. This is just basic.

We who learned how to read young, perhaps by struggling to read Dickens at age 14, don’t have much to worry about. But today’s, kids who are now between 10 and 16 and who are doing no reading at all that requires sustained concentration–I think they will be in trouble. I agree with the writer Jane Healey: she says that there is a only a temporary window for learning the high order of attention that is needed to understand, say, Dickens or Barbara Tuchman or any book-length argument. She suggests that youngsters who don’t learn fluent book-length reading by the end of high school will never learn it.

I teach college freshmen at a public university in Massachusetts, and can report with distress that many of them will say, almost proudly, “I never read books.” The tone of voice implies that books are so old-fashioned–like horse-and-buggy travel–things of the past. Pitifully ignorant, some of these kids are.