jebsblog

I have been indulging in some more thoughtful reading of late about the nature of literacy and particularly the skills of our latest generation. I am a member of the TV Generation and when I was in high school, the educational community was all upset because the nation’s SAT scores had started to drop. There were all kinds of theories at the time: television and comic books were the prime culprits, particularly in my household.

When I was doing my masters degree in school psychology we took a field trip down to Princeton, NJ to visit Educational Testing Service the then-purveyors of Scholastic Aptitude Test – the dreaded SATs. We had a conversation about the declining SATs score with some of the big honchos at ETS and they were engaged in real research at the time about the causes of the decline. They had theories, and yes, television viewing was on the list, but not nearly as wicked as my mother contended. It seemed that there were a lot of factors at work, but we were assured that children were not getting stupider…

As I entered the field of education, I continued to harbor some guilt feeling that we, the TV Generation, did not really work as hard as previous generations. At the time, I sensed that we had had it easier and that there was less pressure to succeed. Clearly, we were allowed to goof off more than the kids who sat in our seats 5, 10 years earlier. After all, there were all these “new technologies” to play with and things to explore. Studying Latin, which had been a requirement for all student at my high school up until 1966, the year I entered, was now only offered as an elective. By the time I graduated, there were no Latin classes, the teacher retired and was not replaced. But this was okay, right?

In college, there were similar events where it looked like corners were being cut. Expectations and entrance requirements had been lowered from previous years, and graduation requirements lowered. But I wasn’t about to complain. Hey, it was the 70s and I was too busy playing my guitar, drinking beer and hanging with my friends.

But this sense of complacency has haunted me all these years.

In 1990, the brilliant film maker Ken Burns released his 11-hour epic “The Civil War” on PBS. I can still remember the episode where the letter from Sullivan Ballou was read. A letter written by a man on a battlefield to his wife telling her how he was “impelled to write a few lines that may fall under your eye when I am no more.” With Jay Unger and Molly Mason’s beautiful and haunting rendition of Ashokan Farewell filling the background, I was moved the first time, and the every time I’ve heard the elegant prose. A graduate of Brown University, a lawyer in civilian life and a man who rose to the rank of Major in the Union Army, Ballou clearly had achieved a level of literacy that far exceeds what most college graduates have today. Could a student today, write a Facebook entry as elegant?

Two articles that I just read talk about “the new literacy” and appear to take the position that things are not so bad. Clive Thompson published The New Literacy in last month’s Wired magazine which described a recent study by Stanford University professor Andrea Lunsford called Stanford Study of Writing. It seems Professor Lunsford thinks thing are not all that bad. Thompson poses this:

But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford’s team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.

You should read Thomson’s whole piece. Good stuff.

The other is from Paul Barnwell and appears in today’s issue of Education Week. Entitled Literary Accountability in a New-Media Age, Barnwell, a middle school language arts teacher from Kentucky, suggests that the perceived decline in the literacy of today’s children is a function of the type of metric we are using to measure literacy. He states, “If we judged these students’ ability to interpret and gather information solely based on their mastery of print media, we’d be doing ourselves—and society—a huge disservice.”

I just don’t know. I can’t find the reference right now, but I recall a few weeks ago there was a report (I think it was in the Washington Post) complaining about students not being prepared for college and the costs of remediation for these students once they get to college is growing.

So, if you have thoughts on the topic, feel free to drop a comment. Me, I’m gonna go watch TV.

~j