Literacy First

In an age in which 30-second video clips and a ceaseless stream of “Flavor of Love” spin-offs have supplanted the simpler entertainments in the battle for the attentions of America’s youth, it has become very easy—too easy—to issue a woeful jeremiad about our culture’s inexorable backslide. It seems clear that active measures to adapt literacy education to the changing tastes of our youth would prove altogether more effectual than the noisy resignation to predicted intellectual decline that others have been so quick to express.

As such, the story in this Sunday’s The New York Times that suggested that many members of the American educational establishment are cautiously optimistic about the role of interactive games in teaching young children to read, was for the most part a heartening piece of news. Parents and teachers should indeed at times allow a child’s interests—even if they are in video games and movies—to work to their own educational benefit.

In the Times report, an administrator at the New York Public Library puts the question very succinctly: “What exactly is reading?” In an age in which information technology and even the use of paper are rapidly transforming, this question is less obvious than it sounds. If, as seems evident now, this youngest generation of Americans will reach maturity in an unpredictably advanced technological landscape, one with unprecedented levels of connectivity and functionality, who is to say that their method learning will resemble that of the past, or even our own, in any very precise way? Now is hardly the time to insist on a reactionary return to a pedagogy that permits only dry book learning. (If anything, the students themselves would not tolerate such a regression.)

And as an industry builds around the quest to glue young people to their TV screen, the least we can do is turn a dubious development in a more unambiguously positive direction. The educational games and interactive novels described in the Times report pass the Hippocratic test of viability as teaching tools: They, evidently, do no harm.

But almost as important as a teaching model that successfully engages with children learning to read is a reasoned acknowledgement that, should this trend run out of control, the next generation may tragically miss in the world of literature. At day’s end, Mario Kart is not the same thing as Moby-Dick; if the former is to be offered alongside the latter, it must be on a provisional basis only. While we should hardly resist the chronic adaptation of interests and habits amongst young people, we must simultaneously insist upon the preservation the our more classic literary forms.

After all, perhaps there is less cause for alarm than a few among us might suggest; perhaps the duel for the hearts and minds of students is not quite a zero-sum game. Mark Seidenberg, a reading researcher at the University of Wisconsin, said it best: “I actually think reading is pretty great and can compete with video games easily.” In the end, our only choice is to have faith in Seidenberg’s prediction, and in books’ perennial capacity to enthrall and inspire.