Taking the fear down a notch...

Oh my dear Melville, let me try and cheer you up.

I too often ride the waves of this same disappointment, especially after seeing the bestseller list at Borders (Sarah Palin? Stephanie Meyers??) or after teaching a class of apathetic teenagers. But two things usually make me feel better: 1) Perspective 2) My own intellectual journey.

[I do not have exact statistics for the following assumptions, so if you have more exact facts, please feel free to correct me.]

I think every intellectual (or reader or avid learner) in every generation feels like his/her society is decaying intellectually and that pop culture and contemporary fiction are getting stupider. Also, the thinkers always seem to feel like there is only a small percentage of those who care about intellectual pursuits…and they are probably right. But does this truly mark a decaying of society or is it just natural that the “intellectual” group is always smaller? And, is our society really losing readers and thinkers in comparison to other generations and societies?

When we look back 450 years ago, only a very small percentage was literate; only the wealthy or a specific class of people (as those in the church) could learn to read. Reading was a luxury many couldn’t afford or just weren’t allowed to do. Then, Luther, Calvin, and others preached that every one should be able to learn and the reading population expanded (this is an oversimplification of a small part of the reformation). However, it’s not as if every single person began reading and studying; more people were allowed to do it, but it’s not as if every person jumped at the chance (I imagine the pay was still as low for professors as it is today).

And, it’s not as if everything published was Literature. The pop culture “trashy” lit has existed since the expansion of the reading population. We’ve had romances since the medieval period, had crime pamphlets in the early modern, and had “dimers” that came out of the American West. Shakespeare wasn’t the only one writing in the Renaissance, like so many of my students think. And, not everything that was published was as good as Shakespeare.

Readers and writers have had to defend the importance of literature for a long time as well. Over these hundreds of years as each new literary movement came about, there were literary articles about defending the importance of literature and defending the newest art form or literary movement. Since there has been literature, there always seems a defense to accompany it. And, like I said each generation has the “intellectual” decrying the ignorance of their society: Milton, Swift, Alexander Pope, Sidney, Wordsworth, Wilde, Joyce (I’m not so good with the Americans), etc etc etc. So, are we really any different? Is it just us? Maybe the general population has always been that illiterate…[Part of today’s issue is that with the internet we are far more inundated with the opinions of the ignoramus, so they have just appeared to multiply]

I think the problem we as educators have has to do with the fact that today (mostly) everyone does have access to education. What’s frustrating is that SO many seem to take this access for granted. Teachers who have been in teaching for years say there does seem to be a shift in today's students. But are today’s kids really dumber or is just a change in their attitude and priorities? And, isn’t shifting attitudes inevitable in a changing world? Again, is it really a sign of intellectual decay or just the decay of manners and maturity?

Whenever I start to harp on these teenagers I have to ask myself: what was I like when I was their age? And, I have a confession to make: I didn’t always read the assigned books nor did I give a crap about Shakespeare. First, I had really awful English teachers who didn’t even seem to take us or our opinions seriously. They were jaded and didn’t seem to think Shakespeare was all that relevant to the world. And, neither did my parents. My mom read to me, which I think developed my love of reading in general. However, it’s not as if I was ever asked to consider the importance of literature to my life; reading was a hobby or fun activity, nothing more. I always liked reading and had an interesting imagination, but I did not spend my high school days seeing Marxist implications in The Great Gatsby. In fact, I really did not see the importance of literature until I was a senior in High School and I was assigned to read 1984. I had meant only to scan the book when I found myself sucked into the story, and for the first time really wondering what it all meant. It did not just entertain me, but for the first time it made me think. It was frightening and it made me confront many of my beliefs, crushing that moral absolutism that so often comes in the young and opening a door in my mind.

Yet I did not enter college as an English major; I actually started as a criminal justice major. (I had grown up watching too many crime shows and wanted desperately to be a spy). My first criminal justice class was taught by a rather large woman who used to work as a parole officer, and the first day she said to us that if we thought real life was like CSI than we should go home now because we were going to be severely disappointed. Devastated that my romantic vision of spy life was not to be, I asked a friend back home for some advice. She asked me what I liked to do most, and when I realized it was reading, I decided to sign up for some English courses (not without some sniggers and comments like “what will you do with THAT degree”).

My first English class was a British Literature course; we started with Beowulf and ended with Paradise Lost. I remember reading Beowulf in an evening thinking it was the most fascinating and beautiful piece I had ever read. I didn’t understand half of it nor could I articulate all it made me feel and think about. But it did make me realize that literature was important to my life and that even though I read a lot, I was far from being well-read. By the time we got to Paradise Lost, I had recognized why books and stories and language were fascinating and important, through the help of a really amazing teacher, of course.

I tell you all of this not to bore you with the mundane details of my life, but to show that maybe students aren’t as apathetic and ignorant as we think they are. Maybe they just haven’t found that book that is, as Emerson calls it, their paradise. There were many other factors that kept me from thinking and reading beyond my comfort zone as a kid and it took awhile to break those. I did not become a really good student until I was a junior in college, when I decided I wanted to get my PhD.

I’ve become very cynical in the last few years, and it has as much do with the petty infighting inherent in today’s academia as it does with the illiteracy of my students. I have recently decided I am taking myself (and the world) to seriously, which I think explains my current reading trend (I have read 7 young adult books in the past 2 weeks). It is not to say that I do not think Literature is important anymore, but I needed to be reminded why I wanted to work so hard to get a degree in the first place: I love to read because it’s fun. When we are faced with same feeling of “literary doom” as Melville so aptly calls it, I think we need to have a little perspective and hope. Not every student will find their way out of the Twilight storm, but some will as they always have. The literary apocalypse is not around the corner, as John Stewart told us yesterday, we need to “take it down a notch.”