It is often said that while today’s college students lack the reading habits of past generations, they make up for this relative unfamiliarity with the written word with a greater visual and auditory literacy that allows them to navigate the modern world of images and the spoken word.

Thomas F. Bertonneau, a professor of literature and film studies, argues here that this is not so. The less reading a student does, the less likely he is to understand even movies. He writes:

I have taught film and popular-culture courses at the college level in Michigan and New York during a twenty-year period and, during the same period, have taught literature—classics in translation, American literature (nineteenth and twentieth century), poetry, literary theory, genre fiction, and much else. Given that experience, I find no validity in the strained romantic hope that the inadequately lettered and spottily informed student will prove somehow to be cognitively sharp in domains “beyond” the book…

One effect of literacy, especially the literacy of narrative, on cognitive development is to create awareness of continuity, sequence, and ethical causality, especially as the last unfolds in a long-term temporal scheme. Today, many college students lack this awareness.

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Fitzgerald writes:

Robert Nisbet in “Twilight of Authority” said we have entered a new “dark age.” This is but more evidence of this sad reality.

Laura writes:

Some people argue that the heavy use of electronic games by boys does not damage their ability to think or analyse. It’s just a different type of thinking. These observations by Thomas Bertonneau offer some more evidence it is not. 

This creeping cognitive disaster is apparent in speech, too. See this on “the most aggressivley inarticulate generation.” It’s pretty funny.

Brenda writes:

That is a fine article. This very subject has come up frequently in conversation lately. I’ve always felt a bit sorry for individuals who view books and reading for knowledge as a dry, unexciting pursuit, the sort of activity engaged in by people who are called “irrelevant” in today’s culture. How sad! I want to share with you a quote by Charles Spurgeon: 

“Quietude, which some men can not abide because it reveals their inward poverty, is a palace of cedar to the wise, for along its hallowed courts, the King in His beauty deigns to walk.”

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