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Art, Literature and our Post-literate Society (continued)

Art, Literature and our
Post-literate Society

"[A]mericans in almost every demographic group were reading fiction, poetry, and drama-and books in general-at significantly lower rates than 10 or 20 years earlier. "To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence."

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA ARTS) paints a bleak picture for our nation. According to this independent public agency, Americans are not only spending less time reading, but also losing reading comprehension skills. These declines, warns NEA ARTS, require attention because of the serious implications for civic, cultural and economic areas of our lives.

Do these changes in reading habits almost certainly brought on by our information age and ever present connections to one another through the Internet, social networks, cell phones, tweets and texts, signify our doom or do they herald in a cognitive shift in how we attain knowledge?

If you were to ask Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University and author of "The Dumbest Generation," we are in trouble. In the recent past -- for those of us over 30 years of age -- books filled our free time. Today, electronic media serves us instead. Bauerlein remarked recently in the National Review Online that "the Digital Age has embroiled the young in a swirl of social groupings and contests, and it threatens their intellectual development. This is not benign evolution of old media into new media, traditional literacy into e-literacy. It is displacement."

The Economist counters this point of view with one from Mark Federman, researcher and former Chief Strategist at the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. From Mark Federman's perspective, there is more at play. Instead of a decline, we are smack dab in the center of a cultural shift in how we answer the primary questions of our time:

• What is valued as knowledge?
  
• Who decides what is knowledge?
  
• Who is valued as the authority on knowledge?

In his essay, 'Why Johnny And Janey Can't Read, And Why Mr. And Ms. Smith Can't Teach," Federman takes a step back and outlines the transition we, as humans, have made from the pre-literate world, where the educated person memorized human history and passed it down from generation to generation by word of mouth, to the literate world. Much was lost in this shift and much was gained. All that remains of the oral tradition of our pre-literate world was captured at the dawn of literacy by men like Homer. In these works, the importance of the rhythms and structures that were clearly understood by the educated of this period are largely lost on us. We are out of context for their traditions. We value knowledge differently.

Federman takes us on a 3,000 year journey that follows the written word and changes it brought and continues to bring us with regards to knowledge. For us, the authority on knowledge has moved from poets and singers to the church to the university to where we stand today. And, where do we stand? To Federman, we are well into mid-cycle for a 300 year cultural transition out of mass literacy that began not with the Internet, but with the telegraph. Why a 300 year transition? It takes 300 years for a society to forget its collective understanding of the way things should be. As the Economist puts it "[i]t's the period needed for a generation to cease hearing about the way things used to be done from great-grandparents, who heard about such things from their great-grandparents." The world drawn by Federman is one in the process of changing from the "traditional, closed system of knowledge to a more open system of knowledge." Today's world is learning to think for itself.

And then, we have the Washington Post and writer Neil Howe, co-author of "Millennials Rising," with claims that the kids are all right., but we should worry about their parents. To Howe, the dumbest generation is the one born between the late 1950s and mid-1960s. Scores for IQs and other important tests have continually increased with the exception of those in the later Baby Boomer to Generation X cohort -- the Sarah Palin, Barack Obama generation.

All sides make very interesting points. What do you think? Join us in the Art & Literature area to share your thoughts in one of our linked blogs or review other topics. You can find our blogs under the "Talks" area of each web page. 

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Young Americans Are the Dumbest Generation | Mark Bauerlein

Digital Kids: Smartest or Dumbest?
Interview 1 | Mark Bauerlein

Digital Kids: Smartest or Dumbest?
Interview 2 | Neil Howe

Phonetic Literacy | Mark Federman