Put Down the Phone and Pull Out a Book - Meghan Cox Gurdon
Writers of horror and dystopian fiction often build tension by adding small tokens of dreadful approach to placid, ordinary circumstances. Everything seems fine, even as the characters glimpse the odd creepy thing. Only belatedly do those in the gathering drama realize they’re in the midst of something monstrous.
The same can be said of a culture in which reading is increasingly alien. Everything ticks along: Publishers still print books, libraries and bookstores still stock them, and some adults and children still read for pleasure. But we are surrounded by intimations of coming dystopia.
College English majors are losing the ability to interpret metaphorical language, as evidenced by the recent disclosure that only 5% of English majors at two midwestern schools could make sense of paragraphs from “Bleak House” by Charles Dickens. High school students taking the SAT are no longer expected to understand passages longer than 150 words. Activist schoolteachers for a decade have sidelined classic works of literature deliberately to rob them of readers and relevance. Young parents increasingly can’t be bothered to read aloud to their children.
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Like characters in a scary story, we need to see that we are drifting toward disaster and save ourselves, before it’s too late. Each of us has the power to show that reading does matter. We can do it by reading—and being seen reading—with dedication, bravado and a bit of countercultural aggression. Be the person on the train who pulls out a paperback rather than a phone. Be the parent in the pediatrician’s waiting room who reads a story rather than letting your child zone out on a tablet. Be the spouse who chooses a novel after dinner over the television. Be the teacher who transfixes the class with a live reading rather than a canned video. Revive the old social norms by setting them yourself.
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Poetry and literature are art forms that can lift a person from blinkered individual existence to sublime and broadened understanding. Books form a great reverberating conversation across the centuries, joining the minds of men and women long dead with those alive today. If we lose reading, we lose the connection, and we consign future generations to a kind of witless groping around in cultural obscurity. It is vital, though, to recognize where we are now. English majors are struggling to read Dickens. If we let this slide, in a decade we’ll be lucky if graduate students can parse “Fun with Dick and Jane.”
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/put-down-the-phone-and-pull-out-a-book-reading-literature-858b6d4c?st=vmqWnn&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
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