Let Them Read Books, Part III
The epic conclusion of the braided essay that rivals Rapunzel's locks. If you missed Part I or Part II, follow the links.
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The Many Benefits of Old-School Reading
Linguist Maryanne Wolf has been at the leading crest of the wave of research into the benefits of reading books, as well as what happens when the “circuits” of the “reading brain” get repurposed for reading on a screen. Learning to read deeply, on paper, “enables the development of some of our most important intellectual and affective processes: internalized knowledge, analogical reasoning, and inference; perspective-taking and empathy; critical analysis and the generation of insight.” The high-powered international school where I work isn’t the only place where these outcomes (called “learning aspirations”) matter; knowing, reasoning, critical thinking, and empathy prop up curricula (IB, AP, Cambridge, 21st-Century Skills, and so forth) in English-taught public and private schools throughout the world. And yet the way we train students to hone these skills is rapidly faltering. Wolf warns in her Guardian essay that “society needs to confront what is diminishing” in what she calls “the expert reading circuit,” to investigate the skills and capacities that “our children and older students are not developing,” and to understand “what we can do about it.”
But Wolf’s ideas are not new. Theorists and writers have long argued that reading literature closely and deeply is an essential skill for intellectual development and emotional health. In her now-dated 1999 essay on teaching literature “of merit” in the classroom (“I Know Why the Caged Bird Can’t Read”), Francine Prose argues that “teaching students to value literary masterpieces is our best hope of awakening in [students] the infinite capacities and complexities of human experience, of helping them to acknowledge and accept complexity and ambiguity” (185). Calling for a reversal of the in-vogue reader-response identity politics of the ‘90s, Prose states that reading offers us a chance to truly understand others, breaking free of “the prison of the self” (185).
Even before the iPhone was a twinkle in Steve Jobs’ eye, Prose foretold the coming attention apocalypse: “the time we spend reading is time spent away from media that have a greater chance of alchemically transmuting attention into money” (186). Her prophecies have come to pass, perhaps in orders of magnitude greater than the television and magazine writing that she was fretting about. Not only has our collective attention been monetized into the greatest amassing of individual wealth in the history of capitalism, said monetizing has been at the cost of understanding complexity and accepting ambiguity. Wolf cites UCLA psychologist Patricia Greenfield’s view that “less attention and time will be allocated to slower, time-demanding deep reading processes, like inference, critical analysis and empathy” as children are trained to “skim read” their devices instead of focusing their imaginations, sentence by sentence, on the page. Unsurprisingly, the “new model” English student Prose envisions at the end of her essay has indeed come to “value…empathy and imagination less than the ability to make quick and irreversible judgments, to entertain and maintain simplistic immovable opinions about guilt and innocence, about the possibilities and limitations of human nature”(186). If this “quick” and “simplistic” ethos doesn’t foretell Rushkoff’s Tech Bro “Mindset,” not to mention the critical thinking of the garden variety January 6th rioter, I don’t know what does.
Our responsibility, as teachers of language and literature, is to fight with the weapons available to us.
Beyond an individual's acceptance of complexity and ambiguity, literature prepares us to participate meaningfully in democracy. In response to the titular question “What Is Education For?” Danielle Allen posits that the basic responsibility of a school is to hone “participatory readiness,” that is, to prepare students for thoughtful and healthy civic involvement. Beyond “job readiness” or fitting into a labor economy, schools should help a citizen prepare to “decide on the core principles that …orient our judgements” about the fundamental US Constitutional aims of “safety and happiness.” To such ends, “surely we need philosophy, literature, and religion or its history…since the democratic citizen does not make or execute judgments alone, we need the arts of conversation, eloquence, and prophetic speech. Preparing ourselves to exercise these arts takes us again to literature and the visual arts, film, and music…In other words, we need the liberal arts. They were called the free person’s arts for a reason.” Literature is but a piece of the puzzle, to be sure, but an essential one. To glean these benefits, though, students and teachers require time, space, practice, and focus to get the most out of the reading experience.
My own career as a reader, to be sure, was sparked by my mother, but my ability to read deeply came from the guidance of many excellent teachers. As Karen Swallow Prior notes in The Atlantic, reading “is one of the few distinctively human activities that set us apart from the animal kingdom…unlike spoken language, [reading] does not come naturally to human beings. It must be taught.” I can credit Sonia Paslawsky, my 11th grade English teacher, for teaching me to read Walker Percy and Emily Dickinson; Mary Alice Delia, my AP Literature teacher, for lighting my way through Twain, Kate Chopin, and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”And these are just a few of my mentors and professors who ensured that by the time I had graduated, I had read dozens of books in school, and hundreds more on my own.
Not everyone, of course, will go on to study literature and writing like I did, but now I can try to pass on some of what I learned there. In college, Tom Nugent exhorted me to “lock myself in a room and chew Shakespeare to a frothy paste!” if I wanted to become a better writer. In graduate school, Dr. Ken Watson was my guide to Keats, as Dr. Jonathan Barron was to Frost. In the quarter century since I learned from these teachers, so much has changed in my own reading habits that I have had to relearn how to pay attention to the page, mostly because I have been adrift and without a compass in the stormy seas of the digital media, where my ability to focus and read deeply has nearly drowned.
Why Digital Reading Doesn’t Cut It
Many scientific studies of reading have suggested that paper is superior to screens in terms of reading comprehension and retention of information. In their meta-analysis “Don’t Throw Away Your Printed Books,” Delgado et. al. name a “persistent screen inferiority” when it comes to reading comprehension. The analysis combines 17 years of research to conclude that while the way that media affect reading is “still unclear,” the recent tendency of schools to adopt digital literacy and reading practices has certainly not led to an increase in these skills. They suggest that preference or “inclination” may be to blame for some readers’ gaps in comprehension, but their study did unearth a surprising conclusion: children who are “digital natives” like the ones I teach today do not have a measurable advantage in reading digitally over adults who learned to read on paper. In fact, they note that “for children growing up surrounded by digital technologies, skills such as the ability to search and navigate, read critically, and multitask are essential,” but that “such skills place demands on attention and executive processes that may not be fully developed in children and adults reading digital texts…if simply being exposed to digital technologies were enough to gain these skills, then we would expect an increasing advantage of digital reading, or at least decreasing screen inferiority over the years. Contrary to this assumption, however, our results indicate that the screen inferiority effect has increased [emphasis mine] in the past 18 years, and that there were no differences in media effects between age groups.” So digital literacy does not intuitively grow by exposure, and students will have to be trained to read digitally as well. This will be tricky, as technology is outpacing adults’ ability to fully grasp its meaning, but not impossible.
Meanwhile, Salmerón, et. al. aimed to test the “negative effects of digitalization on students’ reading comprehension,” and results revealed that “the more that students used digital tools in their language arts class on a daily basis to perform more basic activities, the lower their reading comprehension achievement. Importantly, this association between reading comprehension achievement and the frequency of use of computers is large.” The researchers suggest that perhaps the problem lies in students’ non-academic uses of their devices--that phones, tablets, and laptops are frequently used for watching television and gaming, which can lead to the “context of interacting with digital devices as a leisure activity, characterized by behaviors such as low effort and distraction,” so that when exposed to screens in a classroom setting, the context would be “activated” and lead to “non-optimal learning behaviors.” In other words, bells and whistles work for amusement, but not for reading. While this negative association becomes much less severe for older students, devices with tabbed browsers, pop-up reminders, and access to social media remain distractive to the focus and discipline necessary for deep reading. Worse, our attention deficit has begun to affect our ability to read when we are given a paper book. “Books are static,” notes Professor Erik Reichle, “there’s nothing moving or flashing, so it’s become harder for them to keep our attention” (Gowan). In the same interview, Reichle warns that “the only way to get used to focusing on books again is to spend more time reading them.”
In many ways, then, the digital dream has not come true. We don’t read more often, more effectively, or more deeply, despite the availability of an unimaginable library full of text in our pockets at almost no cost.
Changing Our Minds
The first and most obvious action for teachers is to put books back in the hands of students. Research has shown that paper books are superior for teaching students “comprehension” of stories (Wolf, “Skim Reading”). Even more interesting for classrooms is the physicality of a paper book; Wolf cites the work of Piper, et. al., which found that the human “sense of touch…adds important redundancy to information, a kind of ‘geometry’ to words, and a spatial ‘thereness’ for text” that screen-and-scroll documents lack. We mustn’t forget that students come to school and to our classrooms for a reason; they are there to be together, and the spatial “thereness” of a book will deepen their subconscious connections between their bodies and their imaginations. More important for our purposes than the medium of a given text, perhaps, is the kind of text we teach.
In their deep study of literary reading (that is, reading of novels, stories, poems and plays,” Hakemulder and Mangen have explored the role of the medium (paper or screen) on this skill. “Although mixed,” they write, “the results revealed an overall pattern for the role of medium: more frequent reading of short texts on screen predicted less inclination to muster the cognitive persistence required for reading a longer text, and engage in contemplation on the deeper and personally relevant meaning of the literary text.” In order to teach such persistence, the authors are unambiguous about what teachers must do. Their discussion is worth quoting in full.
Research on reading is extensively multidisciplinary, and with the emergence of digital technologies comes an exponential increase in the complexity and variety of modes of reading to be addressed…However, given that the reading of single, linear, and often longer texts—such as novels or short stories—is of paramount importance for the development of reading skills, critical thinking, and reflection, as well as socio-emotional aspects [emphasis mine], we will argue that empirical research on single-text reading, and the associations with medium, is only becoming more important with increasing digitization. Reading, and especially reading of somewhat lengthy texts, is arguably the most central and powerful tool for thinking. [emphasis mine] Being able to read longer and more complex texts is a prerequisite for full participation in civic society, and literary reading uniquely facilitates the exchange of complex human judgments and emotions, with the side effect of exercising discipline and sustained attention.
The habit of frequently reading short texts on screens may be undermining readers’ ability to, or interest in finding meaning in literature. With the immense increase of this particular kind of reading behavior in all layers of society, among every age group, and across the globe, it seems unimaginable this will not have consequences for literary culture. How we read may affect what we read, and hence even changes what is written, as Wolf ’s (2018) digital chain hypothesis proposes. It is the sheer extent of this potential impact, in combination with the limitations of the present study that necessitate further scrutiny of the relation between digital culture and literary reading.
Moreover, we would argue that it is prudent not to wait for unshakable evidence, only to discover then that the transformations are irreversible [emphasis mine]. Instead, we should anticipate that there is such a causal relation and take preemptive actions in contexts like literary education and the promotion of reading.
But most writers caution against abandoning digital reading altogether in a foolish head-in-the-sand gesture. Ezra Klein’s piece critiquing the “molds” of social media that shape our attention admits that his ideas are “anything but an argument against technology, were such a thing even coherent. It’s an argument for taking technology as seriously as it deserves to be taken.” Likewise, Maryanne Wolf proposes the outcome of a “biliterate brain” for every student, where the mind becomes “steeped in the best of both” media, print and digital. The “overall blueprint” Wolf describes is similar to the way a child becomes bilingual in a bilingual household--to become “expert code switchers” responsive to the media they are reading. This approach would be most important in elementary school, from ages five to ten, where the mind is rapidly developing reading circuitry; at that developmental level, students can be taught the rules and useful characteristics of print and digital texts as if each medium were a separate language. Beginning with strict tutelage in print reading, students would gradually be taught “counterskills” to prevent the bleedover from print reading to digital texts: “reading for meaning, not for speed…avoiding the well-known skimming, word-spotting, zigzag style of many adult [digital] readers…regular monitoring of their comprehension while reading…and learning strategies to ensure that they deploy the same analogical and inferential skills with online content that they learned for print” (Reader, Come Home). Largely, the eighth chapter (or “Letter” to the titular Reader) outlines Wolf’s proposal for creating a new curriculum aimed at biliteracy; she notes her own optimism and hope that we can collectively find our way through as educators.
Naomi Baron, in her 2017 overview of “Reading in the Digital Age,” likewise suggests that “The issue is not that digital reading necessarily leads us to pay less attention. Rather, it is that digital technologies make it easy (and in a sense encourage us) to approach text with a different mindset than the one most of us have been trained to use while reading print.” As teachers, “we need to ask ourselves how the digital mindset is reshaping students’ (and our own) understanding of what it means to read;” her own research has surfaced the McLuhanesque notion that “the biggest challenge to reading attentively on digital platforms is that we largely use digital devices for quick action: Look up an address, send a Facebook status update, grab the news headlines (but not the meat of the article), multitask between online shopping and writing an essay. When we go to read something substantive on a laptop or e-reader, tablet, or mobile phone, our now-habitualized instincts tell us to move things along. Coupled with this mindset is an evolving sense that writing is for the here-and-now, not the long haul.” In teaching students to read, we must also make the case for time and space. If we value Heidegger’s training in “meditative thought,” and acknowledge that skimming, scrolling, and tabbed browsing all damage the mind’s ability to meditate, then we must reverse the trend of training students to read faster and faster on screens. This trend is known as the “shallowing hypothesis,” which “suggests that recent media technologies have led to a dramatic decline in ordinary daily reflective thought” (Annisette). Similarly, writing, as Baron states, “is a vital cultural tool,” and we as teachers of writing have to take a stand against the mindset that drives us to think such a tool can be effectively shaped in the mind with digital corner-cutting and “shallowed” ability to meditate, reflect, and think.
There Is No Frigate Like a Book
I used to open my AP Literature class every year with two poems: “There Is No Frigate Like a Book” by Emily Dickinson (see above) and “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer” by John Keats. These two speakers liken reading to exploration of an uncharted continent and a free vessel for sailing to unknown lands; specifically, Keat’s (literally) breathless speaker sings in praise of Elizabethan playwright George Chapman’s 1598 translation of The Iliad. Keats suggests that the power of “looking” (that is, reading) into this version of the epic is sufficient to make his head spin, dumbfounded—like an astronomer discovering a new planet, or like a conquistador crossing a mountain and finding a vast ocean where he had expected more Chilean wilderness:
On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer
Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
As I was drafting this essay, a former AP Lit student (Class of 2020) wrote to me about her new career as a lecturer (in French, Comparative Lit):
Just dropping a line because now that I'm teaching, I sometimes feel my own former teachers speaking through me like overcaffeinated Muses. Did "Chapman's Homer" as a dictation for a compréhension orale class today (partially because it's the only text of any kind I can recite by heart) and, as we were talking about the poem afterwards, I suddenly remembered you telling us the thing about "inspiration" coming from the Latin root for "to breathe," and that giving meaning to "breathe its pure serene" —a detail I'd almost forgotten about—and I got really excited to tell them...AP Lit never gets less relevant (for sentimental people like me).
I would submit that it’s not just base “sentimentality” that my student absorbed by closely reading that poem (on paper, pen in hand). It was, rather, the possibility that language, and all of the ambiguous, ironic, and human emotion that it can stir up, is our main (only?) technological tool for honing empathy. Taking apart words and morphemes, uncovering the fossils of poetry in the deep vocabulary of the language, untying word by word the complex knot of memory, association, intuition and feeling that a rich English sentence can embody: these are the skills that no machine can replace. For our students to “hear,” in an almost synaesthetic experience, any author “speak out loud and bold” in their imaginations, they must be trained to do so. For our students to appreciate the “frugality” of Dickinson’s “chariot” of the soul, we must teach them to pay—not a “toll,” but a currency that is truly non-fungible. We must teach them to pay with their precious attention.