The occasion of Esquire Magazine's 75th anniversary is reason enough in itself to go pick up a copy. Among its many treasures is "The Future of Words," a brief essay by Dave Eggers, who Esquire is rightly calling one of the 75 most influential people of the 21st Century (you know... so far).
Eggers starts by bemoaning the human tic of assuming that things are always getting worse, in this case with regard to literacy and book culture. Since I can't immediately find a link to the full story online, I'm going to quote from one passage at length, because it's a sentiment I wish more people shared and were talking about:
"Medieval peasants lamented how good the Cro-Magnons had it; people in the Renaissance looked back on the Dark Ages with great fondness. This is a harmless enough reflex–lazy and uncritical, sure, but usually harmless enough.
But when it concerns how we see young people, and how we perceive the landscape of learning and literacy, this kind of doomsaying is a goddamned dangerous kind of intellectual sloth. When we assume, as most adults do, that kids are less literate, less interested in books, than ever before, it involves a willful kind of ignorance, and it imperils how we educate young people. Few if any of these dire assumptions–that no one under 18 reads, that all books will be obsolete by 2020–are borne out by any proof whatsoever."
Eggers is one of my favorite writers, made even more so by his efforts at encouraging younger writers via 826 Valencia and its offshoots, which he also discusses in this essay. I'm awfully nerdy and obsessive about collecting everything he publishes: McSweeney's Quarterly Concern and McSwy's Books, The Believer, etc., even the literary magazines students in the 826 programs create. I hope this particular argument gets read and discussed far and wide.
My superhero son is rapidly learning to read, my younger daughter is not far behind him. I also have experience teaching "at-risk" teenagers in an inner-city school in Washington, DC, where we tackled everything from The Odyssey and Hamlet to new stories by Junot Diaz and... Dave Eggers. So I can say with some authority that I'm with Eggers on this point, the crux of his conclusion in this essay and the real-world walk he walks to back it up:
"Now you have to give teenagers the benefit of the doubt that they know what you know, that they do read and will read, that they will keep books alive–as alive as ever–that they will continue to pull the books from the shelves and add to those shelves books of their own."
Eggers never quite gets to the next big question implied here, so I will hazard it: What if the next generation–you know, the one that read all those Harry Potter books, and Lemony Snicket, and Walter Dean Myers, and all the rest, and is reading online all the time–is actually going to be more literate than the doomsaying one before it?
It seems entirely plausible to me and I will say this, partly as an answer: I have a 4 year-old daughter and a son, now in Kindergarten. I'm not one of those "Kill Your Television" kinds of parents, and they get a lot of "screen time" on my watch: We watch a lot of movies together, and they love all the superhero shows on TV, and they want to see movie trailers and silly YouTube videos online all the time, over and over again. When we go to the neighborhood library, they want to check out DVDs as well as books. But this too: Every night when I put them to bed, they want me to read one more story, and one more after that. Lately I've been catching them in their rooms, long after "lights out," flipping through pages under their nightlights.
I wonder, as I'm responsibly reminding them it's past bedtime and they need to go to sleep, if they can hear in my voice that I don't really mean it, that they could stay up reading all night for all I care and that I secretly hope they nurture such habits for as long as they live, the way I still do.
– Colin Bane
TIP:
Enter the amount, and click "Tip" to submit!
Kerry Lauerman
Louis Bayard
Kirs Rehm
Liz Emrich
Caruso Wegie
Joan Walsh
Salon.com
Comments
I must also confess to occasionally being one of those lamenters, and your post put me in my place. I then thought of my own 4 children who are avid readers in their 20's, and have been for years. My sons are known to reach 500 page books in 4 or 5 days and they all have at least 2 or 3 books they are reading at a time.
I love your sense of balance when it comes to raising your children. Your last paragraph is beautiful. My husband spent his childhood reading books all night under his covers with a flashlight. Could a parent ask for more?
Thanks for the Esquire tip, we'll pick that up.
There's something about the power of words to create in the imagination of a child a place that just beats the crap out of reality that guarantees many, many kids will continue to read and some, to write.
I would quibble with Dave on the contemporaries of the Renaissance looking back on the Dark Ages with fondness, however. That was a rough patch I don't think anyone of any historical epoch would care to revisit.
Now have Esq on my to buy list.
Hong Kong makes a helpful contrast to the Western world. This city has never had a reading culture in the sense that the Western world had back when TV was invented. And yet, there is increasing interest in wide reading for cultural depth. I don't say it's enormous, but it's growing.
I'm not trying to be a gloompeddler or anything, I just think you've raised something really, really interesting here, and I like your optimism.
Last night after writing this, I revisited one of my favorite Eggers stories to remind myself of the genius of his pacing:
"After I Was Thrown In The River and Before I Drowned" is exhilarating, if anybody comes across this and is interested in a good Dave Eggers starting point. It's the last story in the collection "How We Are Hungry." It's also a perfect story for anybody interested in introducing Eggers to a younger reader, and it's an awesome one to try to read aloud. Try it: You'll be as breathless as the panting dog narrating it.
You may be lucky in your children; but your children are lucky in their father.
I, too, have had the opportunity to work with at-risk teens. I found the majority had never been exposed to good literature, and quite simply, they had never been taught basic reading comprehension skills, let alone an appreciation for the written word--a profound national tragedy.
Children with parents like you will most always be successful and they will be lifelong readers of quality materials. The question remains: How do we reach out to the unexposed and untaught?
Even our gifted often struggle against the tide of poor instruction. Years ago I read that fifty percent of high school dropouts in America are gifted students. I could hardly believe it. But after a career of working with K-14 to graduate students, I believe that statement is closer to the mark than I would like to admit.
Some of my first and second grade students who easily qualified for the gifted education program were in subsequent years tossed into special education programs because of their divergent thinking and "uppity" questioning skills (to use a word I'm once again seeing in print). They were not teacher pleasers and suffered accordingly.
Again, your children have a bright future in reading. I wish I could say the same for every child.
Thanks for you comment and your compliments!
I hope you will take my advice and check out Eggers' essay, because he addresses your point head on. The children Eggers is personally working with teaching in the Bay Area – and otherwise reaching through his national network of 826 programs – are not all children of privilege, nor are the young writers he's giving college scholarships to.
The teens I worked with for 5 years at the Maya Angelou Public Charter School in Washington, DC weren't either. I shared your basic assessment – "the majority had never been exposed to good literature, and quite simply, they had never been taught basic reading comprehension skills, let alone an appreciation for the written word" – and I think Eggers' experience would probably cause him to agree with it as well.
The point is not to throw up arms in despair over it: Obviously, my own kids, exposed to the magic of books from conception, will have some considerable advantages as readers and in myriad other ways. But I can also say this, and I hope it gives you cause for some optimism: My experience teaching literature to teens in Washington, DC – gifted teens, teens with Special Education needs, court-involved teens, extremely underpriviliged teens, many of them all of the above – was overwhelmingly positive. Together we tackled classics of world lit and American lit, the African American (and African) canon, many of my own favorite short stories and poems, hip hop lyrics, features from The New Yorker... and we wrote and wrote and wrote... and we published and performed our work to share with our community and bigger audiences at every opportunity.
This comment is now longer than the original post, but here's one final point, and piece of advice to anybody working amidst similar struggles: One thing I think Dave Eggers gets dead-on is the power of publishing and performance in his work with young people. Real reading and writing don't happen in a vacuum, and for most teens they don't happen in throwaway essays meant only for a teacher or a committee-graded assessment. Real reading and writing is about communication, and it happens when kids are empowered to communicate with their peers and invited to participate in a larger literary culture, develop authorial voices, and speak to and write for real audiences. I found my students rose to the challenge every time. Go read up on 826valencia.org and pick up some of their student publications, and see if you don't come away from it inspired and full of optimism and ideas.
Thanks again to you and to everybody leaving comments here: I am truly flattered that random strangers on are reading and responding to Action Academy and using these Open Salon forums as platforms for such lofty discussion.