Mark Bauerlein
Part 1
Mark Bauerlein’s book, utilized as a “push back” text for this 7741 course, is the main reason I felt so ambivalent about Richardson’s text. It has taken me some time to balance both the texts and our class instruction in my mind. Bauerlein served with the National Endowment for the Arts at the time that organization issued its report, Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, which was issued about one month before I began my MAPW program at Kennesaw State University.
Naturally, the report was big news for us in the program, all being writers and wondering how small the audience of readers would have shrunk by the time we got our first works published. Still waiting on that one. Also about the same time, and before the collapse of the economy in the waning W. years, I recall having learned that either Borders or Barnes and Noble (I can’t remember which) had surveyed the reading demographics of Paulding County (next door to where I live) looking at things like percent of population with four year degrees and such, and decided, based on the results of obtained to NOT attempt to open a bookstore in the county, even though it was, at the time, recording some of the highest rates of population growth in the country. A sad, sad testament to the lack of intellectual curiosity and the loss of basic literacy.
My home country, New Zealand had, when I left it, more bookstores per capita than any other nation, much like Iceland which has one of the highest rates of writers per capita. When I left New Zealand (to borrow slightly a tongue-in-cheek comment by one of NZ’s former prime ministers) and came to the United States, I raised the average or median IQ here. Joking aside, I later worked in the KSU Writing Center and met students who quite openly and shamelessly volunteered that they had never read a single book from cover to cover. And yet they expected me to help them improve their writing which provided ample evidence to the loss of basic literacy skills that comes with not reading. It was in this context that I began reading Bauerlein’s book, as if I didn’t need any further encouragement to push back against the ideas of Richardson.
Perhaps there is a mean streak of arrogance in me that questions the point of the curriculum of the nation’s schools, commanded by the mandates of NLCB, that every child should be reading at grade level by 2012-2013. No other nation that I know of tries to do so with the same insistence. Other countries may have higher literacy rates, but they also do not engage in selling the dream of a college education to every child, either. I don’t think enough attention has been given to the concept of functional literacy, which is the level of literacy required to perform the tasks necessary at a level of satisfaction to each individual. By necessity, a journalist should be more literate than a plumber, not to say that plumbers needn’t be connoisseurs of literary fiction, for example, but it’s not necessary for them to be so in order to replace a main water line.
But America has got itself in a tizzy over reading and literacy and now we find out why: the rot is deep and deepening, because of the shift from reading in a linear fashion to “screen time.” The cultural value of reading has dropped and those on the receiving end of this shift, college professors forced to teach remedial classes to freshmen and employers forced to hire workers lacking basic, lower-order thinking skills (like being able to read manuals from cover to cover), may complain about it, but to no avail. Schools are somehow supposed to be able to reverse the tide, and English language arts teachers are supposed to be able to teach non-readers how to write. Bauerlein paints a glum picture. And he found a nodding audience in me. Richardson didn’t have a chance once I was in the grip of The Dumbest Generation.
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