The Three-Legged Woman and Other Excursions in Teaching

The Illiterati

59 sion: keeping it clean and in repair shows concern and effort. It demonstrates attentiveness to detail and the always satisfying accomplishment of a goal—clear, accurate, descriptive speech. Not long after spotting that crow, Alyosha and I were eating breakfast together when I attempted to add milk to my tea. “Dad,” he cautioned, “if I were you I wouldn’t do that. It’s sour.” “Alyosha,” I said, swelling with pride, “that’s a grammatically perfect sentence. You used ‘were’ instead of ‘was.’” “I know, I know,” he said with a degree of weary irritation. “It’s the subjunctive mood.” I was, like, whoa. o p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p theilliterati It’s hard to imagine a time when information was not transmitted electronically. Charles Dickens, for example, serialized his novels in British magazines, which were then shipped by freighter to America. That part of the process alone took several weeks. A story is told of the final installment of his novel The Old Curiosity Shop, which is about the travails of a girl child (Little Nell) and the grandfather who loves and cares for her. As the climax of the story approaches, the girl becomes gravely ill. Americans, having read the penultimate installment, had to endure the agony of waiting for a ship to bring news of Little Nell’s fate to our shores. As the freighter approached the port of New York, desperate mobs—frantic with concern—crowded the pier, screaming out to the ship, “Did Little Nell live? Did she live?” (She did not.) 60 p o u r c o m m o n t o n g u e Whether this anecdote is apocryphal is beside the point. It is a good story with a valuable lesson about a time when the only means of conveying information over distance was to write it down and send it—by foot courier, horseman, ship, or carrier pigeon. The Bible says, “In the beginning was the Word.” How true. I am mindful of a story related by Sven Birkerts in his book The Gutenberg Elegies (subtitled “The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age”). He describes daily life in sixteenth-century Europe , a time when few people could read and as a result there were few books. Those who were literate might own only three volumes: an almanac (so that they would know when to plant), a devotional of some sort (so that they would know how to pray), and a Bible. Only the very literate—mostly churchmen—ventured beyond these few works. Birkerts goes on to describe how the Renaissance humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam was out walking one day when he suddenly froze in his tracks. He had spotted a scrap of paper on the ground with printing on it (this was a time when there were no newspapers and street and shop signs were all but non-existent, because almost nobody could read them). Imagine that. A few printed words were enough to elicit a sense of wonder in an educated man. (Birkerts gives no indication of what that piece of paper actually said.) I refer to these stories about Dickens and Erasmus because they highlight, for me, an obvious truth and a towering irony: we live in an illiterate age. How can this be? There are more books in and out of print than at any time in history. Newspapers and magazines abound. E-mail has become ubiquitous. But confluent with these print media are strictly image-laden and auditory sources of information : videos, movies, cell phones, computer graphics, iPods, and, of course, television the damned. The problem I am grappling with is the supplantation of the printed word by the visual image and the spoken word, and the devastating effect this has The Illiterati p 61 had upon my students’ ability to comprehend and interpret written information in a literate way. In2004,theNationalEndowmentfortheArtsreleasedastudy of Americans’ reading habits. A survey of 17,135 people showed a steep—and accelerating—decline in the number of readers, especially young readers, since 1992. In addition, only 57 percent of Americans admitted to having read a book of any kind in the previous year. I note with curiosity and wonder that 1992 was the year the World Wide Web was getting its flight wings. I run the risk here of sounding shocked. I’m...