It’s always a painful pleasure coming across a research paper that confirms one’s worst suspicions about reality. We all live in small worlds, and that’s how we like it. The agony lurking behind our day-to-day routines is intractable, and most people prefer to keep their eyes on the things they know. Philip Larkin has a grim couple of lines about a rabbit that’s dying in a rabbit pandemic: “You may have thought things would come right again / If you could only keep quite still and wait.” That rabbit is most of us, I’m afraid. Granted, the shrieking lunatics who populate the news cycle are more like demons than like rabbits, but a metaphor can only do so much.
The research paper I refer to is “They Don’t Read Very Well: A Study of Reading Comprehension Skills of English Majors at Two Midwestern Universities.” It goes to great lengths to confirm what every conscious English professor suspects, namely, that college students read little better than your average tuna—tuna being an apt comparison because they also meet in schools. Coauthors Susan Carlson, Ananda Jayawardhana, and Diana Miniel published their findings last year, in a respectable journal, CEA Critic (CEA stands for College English Association), which is run by people who value the traditional “close reading” method of examining literary texts. Their abstract is a good place to start:
This paper analyzes the results from a think-aloud reading study designed to test the reading comprehension skills of 85 English majors from two regional Kansas universities. From January to April of 2015, subjects participated in a recorded, twenty-minute reading session in which they were asked to read the first seven paragraphs of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House out loud to a facilitator and then translate each sentence into plain English.
“Think-aloud” means just what it says: students verbalize the thought processes by which they understand or misunderstand what they are reading. The authors identify three levels of reading ability: problematic (58 percent), competent (38 percent), and proficient (5 percent). To be sure, 85 students is a small sample. And since the opening of Bleak House is Dickens at his most baroque, it is not shocking to learn English majors have a hard time with it. But we mustn’t fool ourselves. It seems all too likely that, for over a decade, millions of high school graduates have been faking their way through college with—as the authors show—boundless but unfounded confidence. To judge by the (mostly optional) ACT, the situation post-Covid has gotten worse. Techies take note: the study’s research subjects were given full access to their utopia-wired phones, and yet most could no more crack Dickens than a fog can crack an oyster.
The full dimension of this educational nightmare, or national coma, or systemic failure, or whatever we vainly want to label it, leaves one gasping for air. We are like the cancer patient who keeps sneaking smokes in the hospital stairwell. We have entered the reality of Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit: “She would of been a good woman … if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” For O’Connor’s manipulative hen of a grandmother, you can substitute the fall guy of your choice: teacher, admissions officer, principal, politician, bureaucrat, journalist, school board member. We have failed our youth, and they know it. Oh, they like their phones, all right, but they feel innocent in their bones, and their elders look guilty as Herod, and that’s why there’s no talking to them. Okay, boomer?
Once we have absorbed the data, and consulted the national debt, and watched our shirking politicians, and stared at our screens until they sicken our blood, a feeling of hopelessness sets in. We have all the information we need, but we cannot act. We have enough knowledge to make contact with reality—rather like astronauts landing on the moon. But we lack the wisdom to put things in perspective and act accordingly.
We are not the first to face a grave social problem demanding all the wisdom we can muster, but we may be the first to make wisdom impossible. Near the end of section II of The Waste Land, a London barman repeatedly tells his customers to drink up: “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME.” The lost apostrophe suggests the inebriated atmosphere of a world at closing time. Beyond the rituals of alcohol, Eliot was sermonizing about the need to get our house in order before it collapsed. His multilayered use of myth, interwoven with the Hebrew prophets, Christian revivalism, and touches of Eastern asceticism, resonated for a society that hadn’t poisoned the wells. Readers still knew about and, if you will, believed in the sources of wisdom that Eliot drew on. Buddha, Augustine, Tiresias, Jeremiah, and the Grail myths tell tragic truths about who we really are. True justice, in their view of humanity, requires severe discipline.
It takes just a moment’s assent to the wisdom of humanity, a suppleness of spirit, a lighter step. Maybe we can do it.
If it is true justice to protect our children and guide them on the path of wisdom, why can’t we do so? I warn you, the answer is a dead cliché. It is the last thing you want to hear. It is not entertaining in the least.
What closes us off from the ancient sources of wisdom is our insurmountable pride. We are too proud to teach children how to read. By our own reckoning, we are much too important. Our teachers are too important (you will recall how the pandemic put the lives of healthy young teachers at risk, and how they courageously stood up for themselves). Gay pride (being doubly proud) is too important. Spreading the gospel of green energy, which will save the Earth for our children, is too important. Lessons in civics are imperative. Our cherished projects will not be pushed aside. They outrank and override anyone’s pedagogical concern for what Carlson, Jayawardhana, and Miniel call “the trap of translating metaphors and similes literally.” We are too proud—too competitive and too superior—to be troubled by undergraduates who, when met with the opening paragraphs of Bleak House, resorted to “oversimplifying,” “guessing,” and “commenting, that is, giving personal reactions.” We are too proud to bother about Bleak House, which has a bleak title and is nothing more than a long, long book, which is to say, an irrelevance. It hardly matters that, as the research shows, “high literacy rates in reading and math are a main indicator of professional and financial success.” We tolerate the reflex to dismiss such success as racist or patriarchal or dystopian, because we go with the flow. We lack the attention span to be liars.
When Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness described how Kurtz “kicked himself free of the Earth,” he prophesied our loss of instinctive humility. Hard baked into our clay is a fearful respect for limits, taboos, and laws. For humility is instinctive, and it takes tremendous social progress to lose all feeling for it. In this sense, we have made no end of progress. Our vestigial hold on limits, taboos, and laws is fading. They do not lecture us, these living fossils of prehistory. They don’t care if we remember them or not. They are not personal in that sense.
In the end, there are two enduring sources of moral authority: one is God, the other is Nature. Millions of Americans detest everything these idols stand for. Their suspicions are not ungrounded—God and Nature have been employed toward terrible ends. But if you accept the need for enduring authority, you must draw from these sources, preferably without whitewashing the hard conditions they impose.
To return to the research findings before us, let us confess that the cost of repairing the problem is more than we care to pay. Like Everyman haggling with Death, we turn to Nature and bloviate. But Nature is deaf and pitiless, particularly toward mothers. Mothers will have to pay a steep price for getting our children back on track—educated mothers will pay the highest price of all. Fathers must play an integral part in their children’s enrichment and education. That is what true justice demands, more than it demands environmental justice, social justice, or economic justice, more than it demands a proper education in civics.
Children are a living first principle. In the end, children will learn to read only if their parents read them books that fire their imaginations. Children come to hate books that have a palpable design on them. There is no other way to answer their real needs. More Larkin: “Get out as early as you can / And don’t have any kids yourself.” Government cannot come to the rescue, because the services required are beyond price. Libraries? Libraries are where the homeless and addicted rub shoulders with literary Drag Queens. I happen to respect Drag Queens and write about them affectionately in my first novel. The homeless and addicted have (most regrettably) a claim on me. But they do not come first. Your typical librarian comes first. I note the authors of “They Don’t Read Very Well: A Study of Reading Comprehension Skills of English Majors at Two Midwestern Universities” did not provide data on the home-environment of their subjects—yet one more exhausting task for three female authors who are already doing society a great service. It is all so unpleasant. We ask so much of women already; must they do everything? But still, if we really want our children to read, the implacable fact—I repeat myself—is that millions of mothers will have to relinquish or modify their aspirations. Nature doesn’t care.
Would society recognize this maternal rescue operation for the good it is? Would pride allow that small token of appreciation? Pride will denounce such women as weak. It will protect itself by projecting its faults on others. I do it all the time. But who knows? Maybe labor-saving devices can help—do any robots know how to prepare a nice salad? Maybe we can cultivate ways of talking that respect our vaunted pluralism. When we encourage little breakthroughs, we are not following the rippling current of power. It takes just a moment’s assent to the wisdom of humanity, a suppleness of spirit, a lighter step. Maybe we can do it. It may help to remember that, strangely enough, there is more to life than the random arrangements of matter. For if we really believed that we would continue what we are doing and ignore the boring data of “They Don’t Read Very Well: A Study of Reading Comprehension Skills of English Majors at Two Midwestern Universities.”
