Americans often bemoan the diminished condition of our political
discourse without recognizing the role that a general decline in literacy is
playing in that diminishment.
The president of the United Arab Emirates
recently passed a law intended to promote reading
among his citizens. Among other provisions, it allotted time to
government employees to read every day; ordered cafes to keep sufficient
reading material on hand for customers; exempted book purchases from taxation;
and provided gifts of books to children at birth.
President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed
al-Nahyan says he passed the law because “there is no future without books; no
enlightenment or tolerance or co-existence, without books, no creativity or
innovation or invention without books; no economic prosperity or pioneering or
leadership.”
I wish to be first among my countrymen to
declare my allegiance to whichever political party incorporates a similar plan
into their platform. Alternately, I am content to vote for the sheikh, should
he become a naturalized citizen and choose to run for office here.
I am not being the least bit facetious.
Americans often bemoan the diminished condition of our political discourse
without recognizing the role that a general decline in literacy is playing in
that diminishment. Those outside the world of education, perhaps, do not grasp
the reality of that decline, but I am certain that many who work in our schools
have witnessed the increasing inarticulateness and limited reading capacities
of our students, even the best of them, from year to year.
Yes, Reading Abilities Are Declining
These students’ general inability to tackle
advanced texts, to follow an argument (theirs or another’s) through its logical
steps, and to consistently express themselves in a coherent, or even
grammatical fashion, would be stunning to those who witnessed these phenomenon
for the first time.
But I am not relying on the experience of
teachers alone. Numerous studies have confirmed the reality of our declining
reading habits. A widely circulated
report put out by Common Sense Media in 2014 indicated that 45
percent of America’s children stop reading for pleasure by age 17. Among
adults, the percentage of the population reading literature (defined as poetry,
plays, short stories, or novels) declined from 57 percent in 1982 to 43 percent
in 2014, according to a report put out by
the National Education Association this past July. A perusal of
these studies leaves little doubt that a decline in reading is something that
is really happening, and there can be even less doubt that this decline has
impaired the linguistic competence of the American people over time.
A lack of linguistic competence handicaps a
people’s ability to debate their political affairs in an intelligent and
constructive manner. Consider only one way in which this decline in literacy
has affected our politics recently.
We Can’t Even Tell What’s Good
The current president is finishing his term
to general disappointment. It’s hard to believe just how much fervid optimism
greeted his election eight years ago, little of which has been justified. But
it is worth asking ourselves why there was such immoderate optimism over his
candidacy in the first place. One big reason was his reputed oratorical
brilliance. He was lauded over and over again, by pundits across the aisle, as
a world-class speaker, and this oratorical distinction was taken to be the mark
of superior intellectual gifts.
But was this reputation ever warranted?
Look at his speech from the 2004 Democratic National Convention, the speech
which planted the seeds of his legend:
In the end, that is God’s
greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation; the belief in things not seen;
the belief that there are better days ahead. I believe we can give our middle
class relief and provide working families with a road to opportunity. I believe
we can provide jobs to the jobless, homes to the homeless, and reclaim young
people in cities across America from violence and despair. I believe that as we
stand on the crossroads of history, we can make the right choices, and meet the
challenges that face us.
As a matter of rhetorical art, this is
nothing. It is less than nothing. It is merely a tissue of platitudes and
bromides, a vapid wisp of pleasant generalities, intended to soothe an audience
like the puff of an air freshener, but with no more substance than such a puff.
A true student of rhetoric would disdain to place such vaporizing in the same
category as the speeches of Cicero or Burke. Among a literate populace, Obama’s
candidacy would never have been taken seriously.
We Call People Educated Who Are Not
Yet it was taken seriously, and by the
purported “intelligentsia” most of all. It is hard to fight the suspicion that
this is because most of these people have never read Cicero or Burke, or made a
close study of any other classic author, and so have no idea what true
excellence in literary art looks like.
In fact, the more one observes these
people, the more one finds evidence for the decline I am talking about in the
yawning gulf between their literary pretensions and true literary competence.
Read the following passage, bearing in mind that it is an excerpt from a
prize-winning novel, and its author is regarded as a very important figure in
literary circles:
Oscar had always considered
Miggs to be an even bigger freak than he was. Acne galore, and a retard’s
laught and gray f*-ing teeth from having been given some medicine too young. So
is your girlfriend cute? he asked Miggs. He said, Dude, you should see her,
she’s beautiful. Big f*-ing tits, A1 seconded.
This is the garbage that now passes for
“high art” among a people that formerly read Hawthorne, Millay, and Fitzgerald.
Over the last half-century or so, there has been a dramatic lowering of the
standard of what it means to be an educated person. This lowering is intimately
connected to the decline in literacy I have been describing.
Hugh Blair, the eighteenth-century theorist
of rhetoric, claimed: “when we are employed…in the study of composition, we are
cultivating reason itself. True rhetoric and sound logic are very nearly
allied. The study of arranging and expressing our thoughts with propriety,
teaches to think, as well as speak, accurately…”
When we observe the sorry incompetence of
our governing classes, we are observing in large part the folly of those who have
never properly learned to read, argue, or articulate their thoughts properly;
who have acquired no stores of wisdom from their education; who have never
developed the capacity for serene, detached reflection—that “smile of
reason”—induced by habits of reading. Their stunted, narrow policies are the
direct result of their stunted, narrow literary capacities.
Consider the Ignorant Rage on College
Campuses
This is really what is going on when we
behold the increasing viciousness of debate among our college students. This
virulence is routinely regarded as the fruit of ideological fervor. But that
fervor is a consequence itself of the inarticulateness and constricted views of
these students. It is the immoderate rage that grows in souls not trained to
habits of dialogue and reflection—habits nurtured through reading. The primary
reason they are shouting is not because they are impassioned ideologues, but
because they are not capable of doing anything else—certainly not capable of
forming a tightly reasoned, lucidly expressed argument.
It is ridiculous to demand these students
stop screaming and argue civilly when they have never been taught to do so,
when their education has never placed any emphasis on the arts of speech.
Indeed, when we find that their professors are every bit as prone to screeching
as their students, it seems almost unfair to expect these young people conduct
themselves any differently.
So here’s a place for us to start. The
tumultuous presidential campaign that recently concluded has compelled
conservatives to reexamine their own convictions, and identify viable causes to
espouse in the near future. So how about literacy? How about defending the
foundation of political discourse? How about we stop pretending any of us can
enjoy true political freedom while we watch our language decay and rot all
around us?
One practical form such a policy could take
would be to support the classical schooling movement, which, in its various
forms, places the teaching of language and literary competence at the core of
its curricula. One could also support vouchers, in order to allow these schools
to proliferate, and funding to organizations like Great Hearts and the Barney
Charter School Initiative, to help bring these schools into existence. These
are the sorts of real-world policies that could accomplish a genuine political
good.
Find Mark
Signorelli online @signorelli89.
