Vol. 67, No. 3 — May/June 1986 —
The Reason for
Reading
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Behind the current decline in literacy is
the notion that it is not important to read. It is, of course,
but how can this fallacy be squelched? Perhaps by convincing
people that they don't know what they're missing. Reading
does you good while making you feel good, too ...
A whole generation has come to maturity since Hilda Neatby
of the University of Saskatchewan first launched her campaign
to reform the English-Canadian educational system. Her 1953
book So Little for the Mind drew sharp attention
to a decline in literacy among schoolchildren, and recommended
measures to reverse the trend. Her revelations sent a tremor
of distress coursing through the country, but they aroused
more talk than action. Now a new generation is in our schools;
and, by Dr. Neatby's standards, its members are being given
less for the mind than before she sounded her alarm.
It is thus with a weary sense of déja vu that
we hear today that universities must place first-year students
in remedial courses to teach them to read and write proficiently,
and that employers must train recruits in the fundamentals
of their own born languages. Junior college teachers complain
more than ever that youths come to them from high schools
unable to read past the comic book level or to write a coherent
line. One teacher recently reported, only half in jest, that
the first completely grammatical English sentence written
by a student of his institution in 10 years had been discovered
on the wall of a washroom. Subject, predicate and all, it
ran: "Reading stinks."
We are not talking here of the millions of Canadians who
are totally illiterate because of a lack of education, social
advantages, or because of learning disabilities. We are talking
about young people who have at least passed out of primary
schools. How can it be that a person can reach high school
- let alone university - without being able to comprehend
simply written language? Critics of the educational system
put it down to a de-emphasise on intellectual achievement
in favour of social and physical development. They say that
a fascination on the part of educational bureaucrats with
technology and "pop psychology" detracts from the teaching
of language skills.
Whatever the specific causes, it all seems to come down
to the widespread notion that the ability to read and write
past the rudimentary stage is not very important. Even less
importance is attached to the cultivation of the kind of advanced
literacy which enables readers to absorb and enjoy quality
books and magazines.
Reading seems to have gone out of style, partly because
it is not necessary to read anything beyond the literature
of one's occupation in order to make a decent living. The
increasing specialization of the workplace has decreased the
demand for the general knowledge that arises from regularly
reading books.
Even reading purely for instruction, as opposed to reading
to make oneself a well-rounded human being, is no longer as
necessary as it once was. The micro-computer has reduced peoples'
dependence on reference books by making it possible to "access"
information that used to be available only in printed form.
It might be said that reading is directly connected to writing,
and that it is necessary to be able to write properly to do
many jobs effectively. But the computer seems to have started
to take care of this as well. Software programs are available
which correct common spelling and grammatical mistakes.
Anyway, who needs to write in order to communicate nowadays?
Except for special commercial and legal purposes, people are
not obliged to send each other letters anymore. In Canada
and other developed countries, they can always deliver their
messages over the telephone. When they must send memos, they
can write them any which-ways and later clarify orally what
they intended to say.
Sophisticated literacy has also taken a beating from a change
in attitudes. A well-rounded education no longer confers a
social cachet. No special value is attached to being articulate,
which is a mark of having read widely. There is no particular
incentive in terms of social acceptance for people to read
books or anything else.
A broad vocabulary built up through reading was once required
to express oneself without looking like a fool in the eyes
of acquaintances. An easy toleration of bad grammar, vulgarities
and obscenities in so-called polite discourse has lessened
the need for precise speech. As soldiers and sailors have
always known, two or three obscenities employed in different
grammatical configurations can cover a great deal of verbal
territory. These are now used freely in place of more exact
words in circumstances where such language was formerly forbidden.
We seemed to have almost come to the juncture where the
former social advantages of being wellread have turned into
liabilities. To exercise an extensive vocabulary and display
a broad knowledge of the world smacks of elitism in an age
of equality. People who know how to use a language felicitously
find themselves loath to do so for fear of being thought of
as snobbish. At a time when university professors and advertising
executives dress {and often talk} like lumberjacks, to identify
oneself with the intellectual elite is at least as anti-social
as it was to identify with the illiterate masses of an earlier
age.
The trend away from reading is such that it is even considered
vaguely unhealthy. The current preoccupation with physical
fitness has lent a touch of self-reproach to the hitherto-blameless
activity of sitting and reading a book. People today are terribly
concerned with what is "good" for them in their diets and
other habits; is it "good" for you to be indulging in such
a sedentary pastime when you could be out playing squash or
jogging? Sir Richard Steele wrote that reading is to the mind
what exercise is to the body; to be "with it" today is to
place exercising the body ahead of exercising the mind.
If one is unconventional enough to choose to sit and relax,
there are far less demanding modes of entertainment than reading.
No strenuous mental effort is required to amuse oneself watching
whatever happens to be on the television screen. For those
with more selective tastes - plus the price of a video recorder
- a great variety of tapes are available showing everything
from classic silent movies to the gyrations of the latest
rock stars. The advent of this new electronic equipment has
led to the speculation that books may go the way of sheet
music. At one time it was common for middle class people to
read music and play it on the piano. The phonograph and later
the radio had the effect of confining the knack of reading
music to a small, mainly professional, group.
Will the same thing happen to the written word as happened
to written music? The answer is "no" for precisely the same
reason as literacy became general in western nations less
than a century ago. Then, the industrial revolution raised
a demand for workers to have sufficient command of language
to follow written work orders. With automation taking over
in offices, industrial plants, and even the neighbourhood
store and garage, the need for literacy is greater than ever
- even though the words which workers must read may appear
not on paper, but on video terminal displays.
So reading clearly is here to stay, if only for practical
reasons. The great question for the future of economics, politics
and culture in the western world is not whether people will
be able to read, but what they will read. If they
only read enough to do their jobs, economic progress could
be impeded by poor communications and a paucity of the disciplined
imagination that makes for innovative progress. Mere functional
literacy will do nothing to further our quality of life.
In political terms, a public which habitually reads intelligent
books, newspapers and magazines is an informed public - informed
beyond the fleeting glimpses of current affairs presented
on television. A reading public is a knowledgeable and thoughtful
public, capable of seeing the issues before it in the perspective
of history and of differing points of view.
The well-springs of education and enlightenment are in print
What Charles Dickens had to say about the role of printing
in society in the mid-19th century has lost none of its validity
in the post-industrial era: "The printer is the friend of
intelligence, of thought; he is the friend of liberty, of
freedom, of law; indeed the printer is the friend of every
man who is the friend of order... Of all the inventions, of
all the great results in the wonderful progress of mechanical
energy and skill, the printer is the only product of civilization
necessary to the existence of free man."
"It is an axiom in political science that unless a people
are educated and enlightened, it is idle to expect the continuance
of civil liberty or the capacity of self-government," stated
the Texas Declaration of Independence. That axiom still holds,
and the well-springs of education and enlightenment are still
in pages of print.
For proof of this we need only look at places where political
freedom has perished. Totalitarianism feeds on ignorance and
illiteracy. Oppressive regimes invariably ban books and censor
newspapers. They are able to maintain tight control over television
and radio broadcasting, but not over the print media, because
the printed word is portable. As books, newspapers and pamphlets
are passed from hand to hand, the ideas they contain pass
from mind to mind - and ideas are what tyrants most fear.
It should therefore be a matter of serious civil concern
that people in the West today - and not only young people
- tend to deprecate reading anything deeper than celebrity
magazines or paperback romances. Ironically, that may be because
their intellectual leaders have taken too serious an approach
to encouraging the public to read better works.
The message should be spread that reading offers some of
the greatest pleasure in the world. Even at its best, television
cannot deliver the deep satisfaction to be drawn from a good
novel. At the conclusion of the superb British adaptation
of Dickens's Bleak House shown on American Public
Television, "Masterpiece Theater" host Alistair Cooke remarked
on all the delightful nuances of characterization and narrative
wit in the original which could not be included in the televised
version. So, he said, he was reversing the standard advice:
"You've seen the movie, now read the book."
A knowledge of life, of the universe, and of ourselves
It may be that young people who do not see much use in reading
think of all books as dull and tedious, like some of the school
texts with which they must struggle. It has not been demonstrated
to them that books hold a world of amusement, excitement and
fascination which they can open up for themselves almost anywhere
at any time. They should be made aware that, unlike other
pastimes which grow boring as time goes on, the enjoyment
to be drawn from reading actually grows keener the longer
one practises it. Most readers acquire the habit from childrens'
and comic books, then pass on to adventure, crime or romance
stories. As their vocabularies expand and their tastes are
refined, they progress to more difficult material - quality
novels, satires, histories, biographies. The desire to move
up the intellectual steps grows as each step is taken. Reading
is a manifestation of Aristotle's principle that human beings
enjoy using their natural powers, and that this enjoyment
is expanded by challenging themselves with progressively more
difficult exercises of their skills.
"Reading maketh a full man," Francis Bacon wrote. Any reading
material except the worst trash, fiction or non-fiction, helps
to fill in our knowledge of life and the universe. Above all,
it helps us to fill in our knowledge of ourselves. A psychological
theory holds that each of us is unconsciously living out a
"life story" which is affected by the stories of others. Reading
gives us access to the entire range of human experience. By
putting our lives in perspective, it makes us conscious of
what kind of persons we can be.
"How many a man has dated a new era in his life to the reading
of a book," exclaimed Henry David Thoreau. One such man was
the monumental Canadian newspaper editor, M. Grattan O'Leary,
who was brought up in the fishing village of Percé,
Quebec. Poverty forced O'Leary to leave school at the age
of 11, but the Bishop of Gaspé opened up his library
to him. "Upon my soul that man gave me my life," O'Leary recalled.
"Think of it! There was every kind of book: textbooks, novels
frivolous and exciting; Shakespeare's sonnets, Matthew Arnold,
Longfellow, and Yeats, of course. And Rider Haggard's She.
I never had a grammar lesson, but poetry gave me a sense of
the beauty and economy of words."
Literature helps us compose the stories of
our own lives
The beauty of words... We all have a longing for beauty
deep within us, and literature is one of the chief sources
of its satisfaction. At its best it speaks not only to the
mind and the heart, but to that indefinable thing called the
soul.
This is particularly true of poetry, which is not taught
in schools as much as it once was, and which has fallen out
of favour among adults. For the sake of the underlying quality
of our lives, that is a pity. Percy Bysshe Shelley could have
been speaking of our own times and the moral confusion that
surrounds us when he wrote in 1821: "the cultivation of poetry
is never to be more desired than at periods when, from an
excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation
of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the
power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature."
The poet's mission, according to Shelley, is to create new
materials of knowledge, power and pleasure, and to arrange
them in a certain order and rhythm "which might be called
the beautiful and the good." In tying beauty and goodness
together, Shelley acknowledged the philosophical concept that
ethics are rooted in aesthetics - that "beauty is truth,"
as his friend and contemporary John Keats wrote.
The search for the true and the beautiful has at least a
subliminal influence on how we compose our own "life stories,"
and it is largely through reading that we can find these twin
values. "When literature intermingles with our thoughts, our
moral faculty is nourished, and this in turn informs the decisions
flowing from the logical and analytical side of our nature,"
Gordon M. Pradl, Professor of English Education at New York
University, wrote.
This moral information need not come from books written
with moral instruction in mind. "One ought to read just as
inclination takes him," said Dr. Samuel Johnson, "for what
he reads as a task will do him little good." Aristotle was
the first but not the last to write that enjoyment within
the bounds of moderation leads to human advancement.
The power to do one good while making one feel good
is part of the magic of literature. Pity those who have never
availed themselves of it - who have never been electrified
by an adventure tale, puzzled by a mystery, been moved to
thought by an essay or glee by a satire or tears by a poem.
They have lost an opportunity to taste delight while at the
same time building up their spiritual defences against the
vicissitudes of life.
The real purpose of spreading the reading habit is not to
equip people to better cope with their work, but to equip
them to better cope with their own problems and the troublesome
world around them. Reading alone will bring us neither happiness
nor wisdom. What it can do may best be expressed
in a paraphrase of a famous slogan: It can lend us mental
and spiritual strength through joy.
Published by RBC Financial Group. All editions from the RBC
Letter collection are available on our web site at www.rbc.com/responsibility/letter.
Our e-mail address is: rbcletter@rbc.com.
Publié aussi en francais.
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