Full of Information, Free of Ideas
SAN FRANCISCO — Nowadays, I find that many of the teenagers who best understand the uses of literacy are sitting in jail. Maybe it’s always been so: One needs to be in a tiny cell, reduced to writing on toilet paper, to comprehend the soul’s ache for literacy.
Otherwise: Last month, the Department of Education published the results of a nationwide assessment of student writing skills in the 4th, 8th and 12th grades. According to the report, only one in four students, in both public and private schools, can write at a level of proficiency necessary for future job success.
I don’t doubt the survey’s findings, but I am less convinced about whether writing skills are necessary for “job success.” I know graduates of some of our finest universities who are marginally literate, also highly successful college professors, bankers and CEOs.
Among the most successful executives these days--or, at least, the wealthiest--are those fat cats who are busily buying and selling each other’s communications empires. But can any of them actually communicate on paper? Just ask their secretaries!
It’s become so common, the exception would be noteworthy. We assume our politicians employ speechwriters, often teams of them. Our politicians are so busy, after all, who can expect Lincolnesque or Jeffersonian prose?
But do we ever wonder whether our politicians can write their own thoughts or, indeed, have any thoughts to write? Many politicians hire pollsters to find out what the voters are thinking. Then they tell us the results when they run for office.
Forty years ago, Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian professor of Renaissance literature, foresaw the decline of all that he loved and knew: the age of literacy. McLuhan predicted, instead, the rise of new oral/aural technologies.
In our age of Bill Gates, we like to think that we are inventing a new technology. In truth, the new technology is reinventing us--pushing us, driving our impatience, shaping our distraction. Electronic technology has exchanged reflection for spontaneity. Individual thought has been replaced by communal exchange.
The other day, I was at a fancy prep school, one of those rare schools in America where one meets young people who read. The kids were wonderful, of course, argumentative and passionate--alive. But when the headmaster was walking me back to my car, he admitted to a surprising unease. He wondered whether his school was, in fact, “miseducating” its students by making them so highly literate. “The future,” he said, “may demand minds less self-reflective.”
I think the headmaster was talking about the famous “information age” that is being advertised everywhere as our future-dot-com.
Certainly, if we are to believe the speech writers for the politicians and the CEO’s, we already are on the “information superhighway,” global and instantaneous. Along this new highway, information, not ideas, is the valued currency.
In its report on student literacy, the Department of Education found that California scored below states, like New York and Texas, comparably multiracial. Nationwide, girls were better writers than boys. Asians outperformed any other racial or ethnic groups, including whites.
The survey also found that, while students were often capable of “social chitchat” (of the sort that now is the stuff of e-mail and instant messaging), they were little able to use language for purposes of narration or argumentation.
“Whatever . . .,” American teenagers commonly say with a shrug, their anthem, when you confront them with the illogic of what they have said or when you raise a point of disagreement.
Are you ready? Kids in Bombay or in Nairobi ask the question on the TV commercial. Are you ready? The drumbeat question means to scare you into believing that you’d better get yourself on the right side of the “digital divide.”
Are you ready for a world in which everyone is talking at once but no one knows how to form a complete paragraph? Are you ready for a world in which teenagers play hate on their computers and then go out and kill their classmates at Columbine High School?
The big news last week, and the week before, was some vast telecommunications empire buying another. Today’s CEO may not know how to write, but maybe because he doesn’t self-reflect, his new corporate culture values aggression and acquisitiveness. CBS becomes MCI becomes TCI becomes GE becomes Time Warner.
The only thing that is certain is that the fat cats who sell electronic communications are becoming very rich, indeed.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the social ladder, sit the losers in prison. Lots of losers in U.S. prisons these days are teenagers. Not a few of them are layered by years of silence. Their eyes will not meet yours, much less will they offer words.
But at the place where I work, we sponsor a newspaper written for and by kids behind bars. The Beat Within, it’s called. To read it--articles and poems and stories about violence or mother or Satan or God or hope--often is to witness inarticulation transformed into the soul’s naked cry.
A girl named Jasmine: “When I find myself a victim of life’s harsher moments, I write down what I am feeling. Writing is like releasing a tear you’ve held in for years. I can do anything, feel any way, and be anybody when I write. Right now, it’s all that I have.”
Last week in Pasadena, a woman told me her brother wrote the most wonderful letters while he was in jail: “For the first time in his life, he began to explore his own evil and his goodness. And because he had no one in prison, he was willing to write to me . . .”
As she said this, I thought about a friend of mine who sent me handwritten letters, 10- or 12-page letters, from jail. The most extraordinary letters, week after week, about Russian novels, Irish poetry, the Bible and the nature of evil. It was like getting mail from the 18th century.
Now my friend is out of jail, and we exchange occasional phone calls or single-paragraph e-mail.
You will tell me, perhaps, that the bookstores are crowded (at least crowded with people having coffee). I tell you that we Americans are losing our capacity to create or understand language that is dense and structured with feeling and thought.
We may be heading for a great, global irony. Never before has the world been so quick in communication with itself. But now that we are “wired,” no one may have anything to say.
Already, you see them on the streets, adults walking or, worse, driving with their cell phones. The closer you get to their voices, the more you realize that they are merely chattering.
For myself, I find that the longer I am in correspondence by e-mail with someone, the shorter our correspondence becomes. After a time, we exchange sentences--like Post-Its.
So maybe we didn’t need the Department of Education to tell us that most of our children cannot write. American schoolchildren are, nonetheless, taller than we ever were at their age--and their teeth are straighter. They are funnier (or at least more ironic about matters like sex) than we were.
Of what news is it that they have no skill writing words of narration or persuasion? Neither do we. *
