Reading : Bridging the Gap

Keynote address by Marj Kirkland

“School reading standards are dropping”

“Literary Reading is declining”

“Classes are missing out on the basics”

Media reports from around the world report concern that literacy levels and reading standards are dropping. The three headlines above are from the UK, USA and Australia. In Queensland, debate rages as to whether the ‘crowded curriculum’ means that teachers have less time to spend on the basics. Students’ literacy and numeracy, the article says, are suffering because they are spending too much time learning such life skills as bike safety and sex education.

But not all experts agree that reading rates are falling. Other research, such as the Scholastic Kids & Family Reading Report show high levels of reading and reading enjoyment. According to the Scholastic report, more than half of the kids surveyed read for fun at least 2 – 3 times a week. 25% of kids read every day for fun. The Australian Bureau of Statistics even reports that reading comes third in Australian cultural pursuits, behind watching TV and listening to the radio.

So why is all this important? Why do we worry about reading? What’s so special about reading?

For centuries, books and libraries held iconic status. Once the domain of the clergy and later the extremely rich, they signified a power not available to ordinary people.

The invention of the printing press unchained the printed word, giving freer access to information for the working class. Little could they have foreseen the revolution which has taken place in our lifetime, where information is not just at our fingertips, but where today’s generation can find a world-wide audience for their voice in an instant!

For the baby boomer generation, reading has meant print and often books (both fiction and non-fiction). Although reading is available to almost everyone, its hallowed image from previous ages remains. Reading, literacy and education are still seen as agents of social change, with numerous celebrities referring to ‘The book that changed my life’.

One such person is Oprah Winfrey. Born in rural Mississippi to a poor teenaged single mother, Oprah Winfrey was raped at the age of nine, and at fourteen gave birth to a son who died in infancy. She has been ranked the richest African American of the 20th century, the most philanthropic African American of all time, and the world's only black billionaire for three straight years - one of the most influential women in the world. Oprah openly acknowledges the role of reading in her life and promotes reading on her shows. It has been claimed that Oprah’s Book Club (on TV and the Internet) has forged a link between social responsibility and literature and brought reading to masses of Americans. You’ll notice, by the way, that she’s using newer technology (TV) to support old technology (books)!

Raised in an orphanage in South Africa, Bryce Courtenay thanks reading for his inspiration. Although his first encounter with a book involved stealing it, it opened his eyes to an outside world where it was possible for slaves of violence and oppression could be free. It was a teacher, Miss Bornstein, who helped him to read that stolen book. From then on, she sent him a book a month and Courtenay says it saved his life.

“Through books, I could escape the orphanage, in my head at least, and go anywhere a story took me.”

Without reading, Courtenay says, his life would have been very different. At the age of 55 he began writing and has used literature to speak out against social issues such as race discrimination and AIDS. His semi-autobiographical novel “The power of one” topped the best-seller list, in fact it was the largest-selling book by an Australian author up until that time. Courtenay is committed to literacy and to programs across Australia which motivate young people to read.

Research highlights the high correlation between reading and academic achievement, confirming its role as an agent for social change. As Stephen Krashen, one of the most eminent reading experts in the US and author of “The Power of Reading”, so simply sums up, “The relationship between reported free voluntary reading and literacy is remarkably consistent.”

Stephen Krashen will be a keynote speaker at the CBCA Conference in Brisbane in May 2010.

In the age of economic rationalism, everyone is concerned about PERFORMANCE, test results…and this is so in education, because in the end it means attendance figures (or to use an Australian colloquialism “bums on seats”). Wider than education though, literacy is problematic for society as a whole, with 20 per cent of the adult population of the UK left without the basic literacy to function effectively. (Neil McClelland, Director of the National Literacy Trust)

Fiction is seen to bridge the gap between real and imagined worlds, between rich and poor, between cultures and ideologies.

But reading also opens up another dimension peculiar to the arts. It takes us to an unknown realm, a journey of the imagination which begins on the printed page and travels on from there to different places for readers and viewers. Our best authors and illustrators take us on journeys we could not have imagined alone, to places we have never been, to view our world in different ways. Who would have imagined that we could revisit and feel empathy for the native peoples of Australia through Shaun Tan’s “The Rabbits” or the plight of refugees in his wordless picture book “The Arrival”!

As with other artistic mediums such as film, it is as though the intention of the author is completed by the experiences of the reader…as though we fill in the gaps and silences of the text and illustrations to complete the creation. Very often through fiction we interpret ourselves, sift out some truth of who we are, and make meaning of our world and where we fit. Books tell our stories, expose our inner worlds – from our brilliant white lights to the intricate dark complexities of us - for it is our imagination that shapes and moulds us.

Recent scientific studies also provide evidence, for the first time, that reading fiction has psychological benefits. Research by Raymond Mar (and others) demonstrates that by reading fiction, we experience a kind of social simulation in the software of our minds, improving our social skills and making us more empathic.

The researchers first of all assessed how much fiction people read by adapting the ‘author recognition checklist’ and checked the results against diaries and behavioural observations. Next they got subjects to do the ‘mind-in-the-eyes’ test to measure empathy and social acumen and then looked at the correlation between the two tests. Their results found that fiction readers had substantially greater empathy and performed somewhat better interpersonal perception (as measured by their relevant tests) than people who read predominantly non-fiction.

Although there were changes after a single reading of fiction, repeated reading of fiction had more lasting effects, probably because of the construction of mental models which identify possible outcomes of actions we take as we pursue our goals.

The social simulation experienced while reading fiction is particularly useful, say the researchers, because negotiating the social world effectively is extremely tricky, requiring us to weigh up myriad interacting instances of cause and effect.

Literature makes us more compassionate but it also reveals the dichotomy of what it means to be human. Literature, says Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz, is a record of our human selves: of our frailties, follies, errors, limitations, fears, delusions, evasions and vulnerabilities. It punctures the myths of mastery and invulnerability and acts as an antidote to the dehumanising effects of war, deception, the logic of capital and the cruelty and indifference evident in everyday life. It helps make us more human. Renowned author and essayist, Milan Kundera, highlights the role of literature to tear away societal preconceptions, revealing the truth, revealing ambiguities which are the true indicator of humanness. And of course we should take note that one of the first marks of repressive societies is the abolition or destruction of literature and the arts.

For me too, books changed my life. Brought up in a very constraining religious home where fiction was frowned upon and the attitude “Higher learning breeds doubt” was openly voiced, my windows were opened at age 13 when my Year 9 English teacher, Mr Jim Ward, read us aloud “L’Etranger” – “The Outsider” by Albert Camus. In Meursault, I discovered a part of myself which longed to be free, to be able to make my own decisions, even if they were the wrong ones. If I had lived in an age of banding or leveling of books “The Outsider” would have been denied me. Yes, I am an advocate of free voluntary reading!

Our view of literature is summed up so nicely by Children’s Laureate, Michael Rosen.

“Literature …supports and challenges readers…in their views of themselves, whether it’s in their families, friendship or cultural groups or social class. It offers glimpses of human behaviour beyond those available or known to the reader. Only when all children are in a book-loving environment will they achieve literacy, yes, but a lot more: a confidence in handling abstract ideas, an understanding of a multiplicity of viewpoint and the complexity and diversity of human interaction that comes through reading widely and often.”

However, if we believe reports that the rate of ‘literary’ reading is declining, is reading at risk, or is there a generational gap of understanding about what ‘reading’ is? Some experts, such as Jon Scieszka, the US National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, argue that for many of us, our definition of ‘reading’ is too narrow.

With less than .01% of the information we generate today ever printed on paper, we would probably have to agree!

Our narrow idea of reading may be causing some adolescents to brand themselves as non-readers. The Literacy Trust’s research shows that 29% of young people who defined themselves as non-readers were actually reading outside of school but they did not feel that the material they were reading was socially defined as reading.

Children and teenagers are reading more online, creating different literate futures to those of their parents. Is it just the MEDIUM of reading which has changed? Or are there other changes happening as well? Is how we read as important as what we read or how much we read? Recent research about brain plasticity by Dr Norman Doidge (and others) sheds light on the way that differing practices and experiences can rewire our brains within a generation. By concentrating on tasks and doing things in different ways, our brains’ electrical circuits are rewired, permanently imprinting and creating new brain maps. Researchers also claim that increased literacy may actually change the anatomy of the brain. Should we be concerned that new reading patterns are leading to physiological changes in adolescents, rewiring their brains in new patterns of communication? Will attention spans get markedly shorter with each generation, making extended periods of concentration almost impossible?

And WHAT are they reading? Is any reading good reading?

“At least they’re reading!” we may say, but are we merely witnessing another form of enculturation into a consumer-driven society? Pop culture surrounds us in every medium.

Young people are bombarded with 40,000 commercial messages a year on television alone. Brands have become an integral part of how tweens see themselves. Is some of the mass marketed fodder served up as literature to children merely another extension of shopping? Let’s get this straight – there is trash out there in print as well as on the screen…and our youth will experience both, just as we may sometimes eat junk food as well as haute cuisine…all in the same day! But as reading expert Stephen Krashen notes, the book that turns them onto reading, their ‘home run’ books may not necessarily be a ‘quality’ book!

More than ever, it’s important to develop in children and adolescents a critical literacy `that questions contexts, bias, audience, and purpose of messages…

Libraries have lost the battle to control information and to be the source of it.

Steinberg and Kincheloe believe that schools will have less of a role delivering information, becoming places where meaning is made, understanding and interpretation engendered. (in Brooks. An impossible passion)

As Dr Allan Luke would say, our role as educators is to shape and make meaning…

teaching students not just to read, but to understand their world, to be constructive sceptics.

So, in an age where speed, connectivity, and portability of electronic media, combined with the entertainment industry’s relentless assault on our attention span and powers of concentration, may endanger the future of books, are they still important? If so, why?

Or should we give up?

Mark Edmundson, Professor of English at the University of Virginia, believes that contemporary students’ characteristically hip, jaded, wary, knowing, ironic, shallow sensibility, their sometimes exasperating sense of entitlement, and their apparent immunity to idiosyncrasy and passion are the inevitable results of growing up in a culture of consumption.

Edmundson the author of “Why read?”, sees reading as life’s great second chance. He says that as we all grow up, we pass through a process of socialisation. But the predominant socialising influence of a particular culture doesn’t work or fit for everyone…and that is where reading comes in. For those individuals, they don’t read for information, or for beautiful escape, but to be socialised into a world with different values. Such people want to revise, or even displace, the influence their parents had on them. They want to adopt values they perceive to be higher or perhaps better suited to their natures.” If religion continues to lose its hold on significant sections of contemporary society, Edmundson controversially argues, what will take its place in shaping and guiding souls? In other words, despite all our reading online, it is still important that we read fiction as a guide to life.