"If we do now what we did before..."

What is our competition?

“It is true that there is more material written and printed and read today than ever before, but there is also a new electric technology that threatens this ancient technology of literacy built on the phonetic alphabet. Because of its action in extending our central nervous system, electric technology seems to favor the inclusive and participational spoken word over the specialist written word. Our Western values, built on the written word, have already been considerably affected by the electric media of telephone, radio and TV.” 4


Marshall McLuhan wrote these words in his book, Understanding Media in 1964. One reviewer, Dwight McDonald, who is quoted on the first page of this book under the byline “Good-bye to Gutenberg,” stated “The serial logic of print is fading out before the intuitive ‘mosaic’ of instantaneous communication. Books ‘contain,’ TV ‘involves’.”5 In 1964, McLuhan saw the challenge that the “electric technology” was making to our print culture. In that year, homes had radios but usually only one TV. I wonder if McLuhan could have guessed that the world over forty years later would be further electrified by multiple TVs in the home as well as in planes and cars, by CDs and DVDs, by hand-held video games, by cell phones and by computers and the Internet. All of these electric progeny of the technology of 1964 involves the attention of our youth today in that same intuitive mosaic of instantaneous communication, the expansion of which might have boggled the mind of the author. That schools would use much of this electronic technology as a basic component of the educational process would have truly amazed him. It is this technology that is the real competitor for the attention of our youth. It is this technology that we must compete with if we want to develop in our students a love of the written word for it has changed their world and ours in ways we have only begun to comprehend.

Some of these changes have been for the better, as technology has broadened our world with information previously unavailable to us. Movies and television have often inspired us to want to read books we had not thought of reading before. Within a few years, the contents of many of the world’s best university libraries will be as close to us and to our children as the nearest computer screen. At their best, these technologies are an introduction to a literary world open to us by opening the cover of a book. So in this age of technology and electronic media then, are we really saying goodbye to Gutenberg? Has the importance of the invention of the printing press, an invention that opened the door almost eight hundred years ago to the possibility of completely literate societies and a metaphor for reading today, become irrelevant in a world of technology? Only if we want it to.


Do we want to say goodbye?

That today’s easy access to the host of technology arrayed before our children has been in competition with time spent reading is not hard to understand. That we are powerless to compete with it, while sometimes an understandable feeling, is not really a true evaluation, and betrays a lack of confidence not only on the part of the promoter but in the product as well.

This statement also begs the question: What exactly are we promoting? The answer in many of the nation’s school districts that are having trouble meeting their academic goals is that what we are promoting is the process of reading and not the reading of the literature itself. These districts, either on their own or through whole school reform packages, have invested in the mechanics of reading, reducing the process to skill related repetitive practice, or “skill and drill.” What did these districts teach in K-3 reading programs? Did these programs work? If they did, these students should be reading on or above grade level by the end of the third grade. If they didn’t, why are we still using the same models and the same techniques not only in those grades but in grades 4-8 as well? As students mature, don’t we run the risk of further alienating their interest? What we have done to reading, we have done to writing as well, separating it from the reading component and using the same type of skill related repetitive practices. Do our children demonstrate any incentive to write today? Has separating these two proficiencies improved our writing scores? It seems to me that until we have answers to these questions, we are just digging down rather than digging out.


“If we do now what we did before,
Will we get now what we got before?”

The answer to this question seems to be self-evident. It lies in the scores of “at-risk” districts all throughout the country. What we are doing now is re-teaching the same skills that young readers and writers learn when they first learn to read and write, and we are doing it with fragmented and mediocre reading and writing prompts, over and over again.

While it would be folly not to reinforce the basic techniques of reading and writing throughout a child’s education, we must challenge the minds of our students with ever more sophisticated reading material and writing tasks in which to use these techniques. We must introduce the use of critical thinking skills to these techniques to understand more complex plots and provoke written response. Reading and writing are two sides of the same linguistic coin. In order to teach our children language in its fullest sense, we must not only let it speak to them; we must encourage them to speak to it. In short, by continuing to feed that love affair a child has with language so very early in life with interesting and challenging literature and to encourage response through writing, we must insure that reading and writing remain an integral part of a child’s development well into adult life.

Remember Dylan Thomas’ response to the question of what made him want to read and write poetry? “I had fallen in love with words. What mattered was the sound of them when I heard them for the first time on the lips…”6 Would our children be able to say as much today, or have we placed on their lips a tepid array of words taken from small capsules of mediocre writing? Are we challenging their intellect with the complexities of master plots, or are we merely exposing them to literary types? I don’t believe that we have to worry about the influences of electronic technology on the lives of our students outside the classroom as long as we have a strong enough incentive to open the doors of their minds to the fascinating and challenging worlds that only great literature has to offer. Our language is our key. The beauty of its sounds will turn that key that will unlock the reading and understanding of great literature and will inspire students to read more and write effectively.