rant

For their final semester projects, my students this fall wrote an essay in which they reflected on their journey as readers. The prompt was open-ended, inviting them either to tell stories about their own reading experiences or, if they did not feel like being personal, to research the most recent findings about the science of reading. Most did a mixture of both.

In preparation for the essay, we read John Holt's frequently anthologized rumination on "How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading." Holt's essay dwells on the pitfalls of trying to teach "great books" (or vocabulary) in the general literature classroom. His critique of the institution of English teaching is both strident and worth hearing. It never fails to get students talking.

I finished reading my students' essays over the last week, and the results can be synthesized as follows:
* many children either never liked reading or stopped enjoying reading around the middle grades
* for some, the problem with reading started with decoding; for any number of reasons--actual disorders, lack of encouragement, flawed schooling--these kids either did not learn to read properly (ever!) or they learned only after being labeled as "slow" readers
* for others, enthusiasm waned after they hit the middle grades and became subject to the onslaught of assigned school reading
* almost all regret either never becoming readers or giving up on being readers around adolescence
* many wish that the adults in their lives had encouraged them more strongly to identify as readers
* many (almost all) bemoan the effects of technology on their reading lives
* many say that they wish they reached more often (or sometimes) for a book instead of their phone or iPad
* many cry out for help into what they perceive as a void of adult obliviousness--either to the fact that the books they are interested in are not the books being assigned in school or to the fact that they--the kids--don't know how to handle their own addiction to technology

The last bullet point really gets to me. It's what I'll be writing about here.

I feel increasingly embattled in what I perceive as a turf war for the minds of my children at home and my students at school. I know of exactly one other parent who shares my concern that relentless exposure to screens is wreaking havoc on children's ability to, among other things, 1) focus 2) think clearly and 3) engage in introspection. We are raising a generation of kids whose need for constant stimulation dooms them to life-long unhappiness. Many of these kids want to be helped but don't know how to ask for help. Many are more aware than the adults around them of the pernicious influence of screens. Most are also addicted and, like all addicts, they love their own disease.

My own students had only to google the question in order to come up with mountains of information about the benefits of talking to and reading with young children. Much of the research is geared towards the infant and toddler age group, but everyone seems to assume that the benefits of meaningful conversation and exposure to print extend well into childhood and adolescence. There is also evidence that lack of those two--conversation and print--leads to academic difficulties and civic disengagement. My personal intuition tells me that children who don't read other people's stories also lack the ability to reflect deeply on their own lives.

I am told that TV and movies these days do a phenomenal job of telling stories. I believe that. I am not convinced, however, that seeing a story enacted on screen does the same for our ability to look inward and understand ourselves as reading that same story told over a series of pages, with the care and patience and thoughtfulness required to string words together into coherent sentences. Call me old-fashioned.

For reasons I don't need to go into, we recently find ourselves in the odd position of having to listen to other parents as they explain their rationale for letting their kids use technology a little or a lot. We don't advertise our views or discuss our choices in public unless someone specifically asks us. The word is out, apparently, that we are doing things differently, and people who've never asked us directly about it feel duty bound to tell us why what they are doing makes sense to them. These are not conversations but monologues. And we'd so much rather not be listening to them. We'd rather explain why we do what we do to our own kids, and leave everyone else to their own devices. Ahem.

At the same time, it irks us that the reigning cultural assumption around here is that if my kid is playing on the iPad and yours wants to come over and play also, the parents' permission is not required. As with the iPads being handed out at school, which we view as a violation of the family's right to handle issues of technology, kids foisting devices onto our kids feels like an invasion of our privacy. That's a complex thought which people either find absurdly outlandish or refuse to engage with altogether.

And so we march on.

Kids will do as they see the adults around them do. If the adults are always engaged on devices, then the kids will rightfully demand that they be given free access to devices also. If the adults are reading books and magazines, then kids will embrace print reading as the norm.

We happen to like written stories--fiction and non-fiction. We make the intentional choice to read out loud to our kids or to sit with them reading our novels and magazines while they read their own books, silently. We have no illusions about the fact that our kids will spend most of their adulthood connected to devices. We simply opt out of the devices for the present moment.

Time will tell if our choices are causing irreparable damage. We don't seek to convert anyone, and we ask that no one seek to convert us.

Rant over!