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The Erosion of Deep Literacy

nationalaffairs.com

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Re: The Erosion of Deep Literacy

#21

Post by keiferski »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #12

This article makes far reaching societal claims with essentially no evidence. The evidence presented is in the form of "feelings" of various writers concerned of their own decline in literaryfocus. An unvoiced assumption that people were historically more literate pervades the entire article. As a former lit. major I used to buy into this kind of thing. But I now think this belief is the product of profound selection…

The issue isn't whether there are abundant "literate" resources (podcasts, in your example) but whether the average member of a democratic society is literate. More importantly, whether the elites are deeply literate.

I don't know about you, but when I look at the popular media and at political leaders, they seem highly illiterate compared to those from just a century ago. Even the "literate elite" media, e.g. The New Yorker, has dropped in quality from a few decades ago. Just read some old issues to see what I mean.

Regardless, this article is hardly the first or only study of this problem. Allan Bloom wrote The Closing of the American Mind in 1987. Harold Bloom and John Simon wrote a few books on the topic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mi...

Re: The Erosion of Deep Literacy

#23

Post by refactor_master »

onecommentman wrote: post #18

“If you do not deep read, you do not cultivate a capacity to think, imagine, and create; you therefore may not realize that anything more satisfying than a video game even exists.” Hence universal public education. The author, though, is talking about making additional effort, as though schooling alone didn’t achieve these basic ends. Glad I didn’t go to his high school. Given a finite amount of time (albeit a near-i…

I think what the article tries to get at (and what I’ve also read being echoed elsewhere in similar works) is that this “deep read” ability means having a working memory able to process and extrapolate from what you’re reading.

Reading and chanting the Bible or Little Red Book and taking everything at face value is not being skilled at deep reading. Only if you possess the ability to read and think at the same time will you stop and say “hey wait a minute, this doesn’t make sense”.

On the other end is shallow reading which is defined as reading “God said this, and these people are bad”, and internalizing that instantly without thinking about why.

But as a stand-alone piece I see how this article has a few “gaps”.

Re: The Erosion of Deep Literacy

#24

Post by kiba »

keiferski wrote: post #21
DubiousPusher wrote: post #12

This article makes far reaching societal claims with essentially no evidence. The evidence presented is in the form of "feelings" of various writers concerned of their own decline in literaryfocus. An unvoiced assumption that people were historically more literate pervades the entire article. As a former lit. major I used to buy into this kind of thing. But I now think this belief is the product of profound selection…

The issue isn't whether there are abundant "literate" resources (podcasts, in your example) but whether the average member of a democratic society is literate. More importantly, whether the elites are deeply literate. I don't know about you, but when I look at the popular media and at political leaders, they seem highly illiterate compared to those from just a century ago. Even the "literate elite" media, e.g. The Ne…

So, it 'seems'. Is there a systematic study measuring the 'literacy' quality of thoughts over time in media?

Re: The Erosion of Deep Literacy

#25

Post by keiferski »

kiba wrote: post #24
keiferski wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue isn't whether there are abundant "literate" resources (podcasts, in your example) but whether the average member of a democratic society is literate. More importantly, whether the elites are deeply literate. I don't know about you, but when I look at the popular media and at political leaders, they seem highly illiterate compared to those from just a century ago. Even the "literate elite" media, e.g. The Ne…

So, it 'seems'. Is there a systematic study measuring the 'literacy' quality of thoughts over time in media?

The article itself is about such studies in relation to the brain. A simple google search brings dozens of related results.

https://all4ed.org/articles/a-decade-of-decline-survey-finds...

https://theweek.com/articles/875253/unsurprising-decline-chi...

https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/1996/05/15/34roch.h15.htm...

https://ivyreads.com/blog/academic-literacy-is-declining

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247760981_Literacy_...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/30/us/reading-scores-nationa...

Furthermore, if your only metric of determining truth is a social science study, I think you're perhaps missing the forest for the trees.

Re: The Erosion of Deep Literacy

#26

Post by g5095 »

LOOK AT THE MEDIUM.

I pick up a book, it has HEFT. I FEEL satisfied with my selection in hand, that I have acquired a goodly amount of reading material on a subject or by an author who I feel is worthy of my time.

I open the book and skim the contents page, a worthy array of subjects that pique my interest entice me on but the MEDIUM prevents me from an indulgent glance. I understand inherently that I am expected to progress through the material with the author, at their pace before I can uncover the gold within.

I open the article 'The Erosion of Deep Literacy' in my browser. A PROGRESS METER appears on the right-hand side known as the scroll-bar telling me this article is longer than a three minute read, and that I have a LONG WAIT ahead before my progress is complete.

Immediately I want to know if the article is worth my time and without a CONTENTS PAGE to assure me I flick the oh-so convenient mouse wheel or thumb across my screen and scroll to the bottom with happy abandon!

JUDGEMENT BEGINS as I scan for hints of life; highlighted text, INFO BOXES.. PICTURES!? my guide-posts of worthiness are lacking and emotions set in.. Do I really WANT to spend fifteen whole minutes here?

Long-form is dead on the web of my heart, flicked away like a tik-tok meme that took too long to load... oh look, a butterfly!

Re: The Erosion of Deep Literacy

#27

Post by scottlocklin »

tbrownaw wrote: post #7

Educational attainment has been increasing steadily since at least 1940 (as far back as the chart on Wikipedia shows): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_... I am skeptical that this "deep literacy" is in fact eroding, since it's what lets you learn a topic well enough to get a degree. It's also hard work; I'll put in the effort on topics that matter -- as in topics that usefully inform my fu…

>Educational attainment has been increasing steadily since at least 1940

Absolute hogwash. In my parents day (in the 60s) high school included mastery of at least one foreign language and one dead language. Mom and dad read Beowulf in high school, in Anglo Saxon; something modern English majors don't do. And my parents were working class people at working class schools in a factory town. Moving the goalposts to allow morons to get a high school diploma isn't improving educational attainment. Hell, I could point out a dozen examples of decline in Bachelors degrees in my lifetime.

This was a meme a few years ago: a 1800s era Harvard entrance exam, and Harvard was the easy school: https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvard...

Re: The Erosion of Deep Literacy

#28

Post by ezequiel-garzon »

samoa42 wrote: post #10
ultramundane8 wrote: post #6

This is a really interesting piece. I've been wanting to rage against illiteracy lately but I'm not too active in public discourse (even this). That said, I don't think it's some secret key to improving humanity. I think this because literacy is ultimately a luxury, even in modernity. The literate may be able to form more nuanced opinions, but that matters less if they can't increase literacy consistently across popu…

"those who dont know history are bound to repeat it" literacy is the only way to improve humanity.

I'm quite sure Germany's population was as literate in the 1930's as any other. It's subtler than that.

Re: The Erosion of Deep Literacy

#29

Post by auganov »

If abstractness and departure from orality is the ultimate goal, you'd want highly technical writing, mathematical notation and so forth. The type of reading the author encourages - long-form societal discourse, is still relatively oral.

There are many contradictory ideas in this piece. Speed-reading is cited as a sign of poor literacy but then so is vocalization. The two are pretty much opposites.

Re: The Erosion of Deep Literacy

#30

Post by bem94 »

> Thus, we have a writer privately squeezing into an artificial, decontextualized "space" in order to convey something, fictive or not, to unknown readers in unknown but theoretically very distant times who are similarly situated, so to speak, in an artificial, decontextualized space.

Good grief.

Edit: This whole article could use a furious edit.

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