(12) Speaking of the Brain: School and the Reading Brain

All these articles I seem to be finding "by coincidence," but some people believe that there's no such thing (as coincidence, I mean).

In Blog Post No. 11, neuroscientist Dr. Gary Small says that surfing the Internet can alter your brain, for good and bad.

In this post, thanks to a 2008 article in The Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation Education Forum, by Jon Cowans (recently retired from Durham District School Board), you'll find the results and comments of two authors, Maryanne Wolf [Proust and the Squid (2007)], and Mark Bauerlein [The Dumbest Generation (2008)], who say that reading alters your brain.

"Who would have thunk it without all this research?" Or is this just another case of "the perfect grasp of the obvious?" I strongly feel that teachers were among the first to know that something was happening "out there" when basic reading was supplanted with so many other priorities. Reading cannot help but be the cornerstone of understanding information from both print and electronic sources.

Reading can also be a struggle at times for learners, as well as for people who think they've already mastered that skill. How many times do you catch yourself rereading a sentence, paragraph or whole chapter because you felt you just didn't get it? Could be that you're tired, you're distracted, or that the text is just a bit beyond your understanding. All three reasons are valid.

If you want to improve your tennis, you always play with someone better than yourself. If you want to improve your reading, same thing: read something slightly beyond your grasp, outside your interest or specialty area. It only stands to reason that this will improve your knowledge, as well as your brain. Ask anyone who has learned a foreign language to near-native fluency. It's always a frustrating process, but the rewards, both concrete and intangible, are beyond words!

After attending a post-secondary institution, the person who has earned a community college, not a university, diploma, is often the one who will be required to read the most in his/her working life: the garage mechanic or the aircraft maintenance technician must remain current with the latest developments in technology by reading manuals and other technical documents.

Alright, now, here's the article, and thank you, Jon Cowans and OSSTF!

Teaching students to read: it is the school’s original and still primary function. Nowadays, it is also its most challenging one.

Since the publication of Rudolph Flesch’s controversial bestseller Why Johnny Can’t Read in 1955, there has been widespread public concern that a growing number of students are leaving school unable to read proficiently. In response, education authorities across North America have invested heavily in remediation classes, reading programs and literacy tests. Yet real success has proven elusive.

What then makes the teaching of reading so difficult? To Flesch, the problem lay primarily with the flawed reading pedagogy of the 1950s, the so-called “look-say” method, but this explanation alone is inadequate.

Two recent books, Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid (2007), and Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation (2008), offer insights not discernable half a century ago as to why Johnny can’t read.

We were never born to read

The subtitle of Wolf’s work, The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, identifies her subject matter more clearly than the cryptic main title. A professor of child development at Tufts University and director of its Center for Reading and Language Research, Wolf brings to the book both expertise and a strong personal belief in reading as a civilizing activity. In clear, non-technical language, she describes the historical development of reading and the results of the latest research into how reading changes the brain.

Wolf’s opening statement, “We were never born to read,” establishes the central problem with acquiring facility in the medium. Unlike the spoken language, which is partly innate, the written language is a cultural invention. Just a few thousand years old, it works by piggybacking on other basic brain functions. In doing so, reading modifies the physical structures of the adapting organ. But the change is not just physical: “In much the way reading reflects the brain’s capacity for going beyond its structures, it also reflects the reader’s capacity to go beyond what is given in the text.”

Through reading, the natural mind is enlarged, and thereby enabled to reason, imagine, create, feel and experience life more fully and subtly. Over the course of history, human thought and literature have grown in a reciprocal union. As a result, the written language has become more extensive and complex than the spoken, making the former harder and slower to master—to the frustration of generations of students.

Wolf informs us: “To acquire this unnatural process, children need instructional environments that support all the circuit parts that need bolting for the brain to read.” The initial environment for this is the home, but, unfortunately, not all homes are equal in this respect. The average middle-class five-year-old, she informs us, will enter school having heard an astounding 32 million more words than an underprivileged child. The result is obvious: “Children who begin kindergarten having heard and used thousands of words, whose meanings are already understood, classified, and stored away in their young brains, have the advantage..."

In some cases, a student’s original disadvantage comes from another source—the reading disability known as dyslexia. Wolf devotes two of her nine chapters to this topic. Her interest is both professional and personal: her son Ben is dyslexic.

Wolf’s detailed discussion of dyslexia and the various theories accounting for it will be of particular value to educators. Ongoing research suggests that the disability stems from a variety of causes, one of which concerns how the left and right hemispheres of the dyslexic brain are wired. Even here, the evidence is ambiguous, and Wolf is unsure “whether right-hemisphere reading circuits are the cause of not being able to name letters and read words, or the consequence.”

Another impediment to reading development is cultural, namely the potentially adverse effects of digital media, leading Wolf to ask: “What would be lost to us if we replaced the skills honed by the reading brain with those now being formed in our next generation of ‘digital natives,’ who sit and read transfixed before a screen?” She wonders whether “the immediacy and seeming comprehensiveness of the on-screen information” render students less willing to engage in the close reading and creative interpretation of texts they they increasingly regard as anachronistic.

(...)

In 2004, Bauerlein oversaw the publication of the National Endowment for the Art’s controversial report Reading at Risk, which revealed a substantial decline in American reading habits among both young and old over the past three decades. The title of his most recent book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, bluntly sets forth the work’s provocative tone and topic.

(...)

In part, The Dumbest Generation is a response to Steven Johnson’s 2005 bestseller, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. Johnson contends that popular media, once regarded as dumbed-down and potentially harmful, has matured to the point that it actually increases intelligence. His evidence? The fact that scores on IQ tests have been rising over the past half-century, a trend only accountable, he claims, by a rise in the level of popular culture.

Bauerlein answers Johnson’s use of IQ test evidence with several strong counter-arguments, of which the most convincing is his question: “Why haven’t knowledge and skill levels followed the same path?” Bauerlein cites a host of studies indicating that students’ knowledge and skill levels have in fact fallen markedly over recent decades. Educators can decide for themselves whether his evidence corresponds to their own classroom experience.

Bauerlein identifies reading, especially, as being under threat from digital media. Using a variety of data, he demonstrates that not only has students’ ability to read declined, but so too has their desire, naming them “the new bibliophobes.” He cites a few telling statistics:

1. The 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy: Only 31 per cent of university graduates tested attained “proficiency” in reading.

2. The 2005 American Time Use Survey: 15- to 24-year-olds read on average about eight minutes a day in their spare time.

3. The 2007 National Freshman Attitudes Report: 53.3 per cent of students disagreed with the statement “I get a great deal of satisfaction from reading” while 42.9 per cent disagreed with “Over the year, books have broadened my horizons and stimulated my imagination.” (These are first-year university students, remember.)

Compare these to a fourth statistic:
4. The 2005 Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8 18-Year-Olds: Those tested spent an average of five-and-a-half hours a day in front of a screen (TV and computer) outside school. (Time devoted to IPod, cell phone and radio use was not tracked.)

(...)

Accordingly, he questions the school’s increasing use of electric media to make curriculum seem more relevant accessible. Bauerlein argues that the young “don’t need more pop culture and youth perspective in the classroom. They get enough of these on their own.” The trend towards relevance merely reinforces the limited and narcissistic worldview served up to the young in the digital culture, one focused largely on their present personal and social needs. Bauerlein describes the result: “Dissociated from tradition, with nobody telling them that sometimes they must mute the voices inside them and heed instead the voices of distant greatness, young people miss one of the sanative, humbling mechanisms of maturity…. Tradition provides grounding against and refuge from the mercurial ebb and flow of youth culture.”

The most comprehensive medium through which the “voices of distant greatness” can be heard is reading, the very activity many students now neglect. In doing so, they cut themselves off from its significant benefits: “more civic and historical knowledge, familiarity with current events and government actions, a larger vocabulary, better writing skills, eloquence, inexpensive recreation, and contact with the great thoughts and expressions of the past.”

Bauerlein dismisses the claim that the same benefits can be gained through on-line learning. In spite of the growing availability of educational resources on the Internet, he argues that the seductive, multiform nature of the medium distracts the young, and reduces reading to mere scanning: “With the read/write/film/view/browse/message/buy/sell web, adolescent users govern their own exposure, and the didactic and artistic content of smarter sites flies by unseen…. The popular digital practices of teens and 20-year-olds didn’t and don’t open the world. They close the doors to maturity, eroding habits of the classroom, pulling hours away from leisure practices that complement classroom habits.”

Apparently, the young aren’t the only ones whose reading ability is being compromised by the Internet. In a recent article in Atlantic Monthly (July/August 2008), “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, writer Nicholas Carr complains that extensive use of the Internet for personal research has been “chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Internet distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles…. I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences.”

In defense of reading

The Dumbest Generation could be more forthright in assigning blame for the decline it describes. If many young people are no longer making books their first choice of media, they are merely following the general drift of their cultural environment, one created by adults. It therefore seems hypocritical of the latter to decry the young’s declining reading ability while providing them with the very devices responsible for it, and reading less themselves.

Parents, in particular, need regular reminding that reading must be nurtured at home as well as at school, and that children’s use of digital media, now far more plentiful in most homes than books and newspapers, has to be monitored and regulated. Educators, meanwhile, must set as their principal task—at all levels of education—the immediate improvement of students’ reading skills.

Here are some simple ways that I (Jon Cowans) think Ontario’s secondary schools

1. Build 15 minutes of daily quiet reading into all academic courses, where practical. (The semester’s 75-minute period is ideal for this purpose). In a four-period schedule, this would result in one hour of sustained reading per day and compensate for any lack of personal reading outside school. Allow students to choose their own subject-related material. Include this reading in their evaluation.

2. Remove the media strand from English courses. Since there are now three media arts courses in the Ontario curriculum, media study no longer needs to piggyback on English, a subject which requires all the time it can get.

3. Replace the library’s computers with books. Let students do their web surfing, academic or otherwise, at home and use the library for the print-based research characteristic of higher learning.

4. Get rid of the Literacy Test. This multi-million-dollar exercise in political PR shows teachers, students and parents nothing they don’t already know from the classroom. If anything, the test turns kids off reading and writing. Invest the money saved into more library books—and more librarians.

I find it's very hard to disagree with Mr. Cowans' recommendations. I've always thought that if educators are encouraging increased use of electronic media, at the expense of reading, we only have ourselves to blame for the results. Ask yourself, "Could a person of Trudeau's or Obama's stature and eloquence have been raised and educated exclusively with electronic methods and resources?"

Later,

Rob