Yawn....that kind of attack by Bauerlein that resorts to silly name calling really adds to the discourse.

This from a person who has made claims about entire disciplines based upon a skim of cherry-picked (his word) presentation titles from a conference program?

http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/comp_work/

Please.

cgb

By now, Bauerlein's predictable harrumphings have him veering close to self-caricature.

I will admit to feeling a certain disquiet when I read reports of the death of reading. It's almost an almost involuntary reaction, and I suspect that most people who read and write for a living experience a similar sensation. That makes us an easy target for those who would like to forecast the death of reading (and who want to take concrete steps to get us off our blogs, our cell phones, our gaming consoles, and our chat clients).

But these arguments are very difficult to sustain. I have, for many years now, been telling my students how strange it is that we not only study novels, but print up colorful posters in school libraries exhorting others to read for, of all things, pleasure. Any way you look at it, the assumption that reading is "good for you" is a startlingly new phenomenon in the history of the west. The impoverished culture that such reports invariably forecast is one in which reading remains considerably more prevalent than it was during the flowering of Greek civilization in the fifth century B.C.E, the Italian Renaissance, and the European Enlightenment.

I took the main point of your piece, Matt, to be precisely this: that the NEA report is based on assumptions and draws conclusions that are strikingly outside of any historical consideration.

Baulerine is right; there's lots of data out there. Much of it indicates that our reading practices are changing radically and that traditional "pleasure reading" is becoming more and more an esoteric hobby (like it was when reading first gained the ascendancy a short time ago). Such a decline would almost certainly result in epochal cultural change. But why is Bauerline so convinced that this is bad? He either assumes it has always been thus, or he takes a highly teleological view of human culture. No wonder the academics are skeptical.

Firstly for those following the debate:
NEA report: http://www.nea.gov/news/news07/TRNR.html

Kirschenbaum's original response: http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=fgprwfnh32l7d3thj18vh3jz79k9f6fw

Bauerlein's response to Kirschenbaum: http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:G3--y5wkctwJ:chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i18/18b02501.htm

Kirschenbaum's response to Bauerlein: http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/01/reading_between_the_lines.html

I tend to agree with you on this one. Looking through the executive report, it is easy to see a very flawed understanding of reading which does not give much attention to digital media. I believe students are reading fewer books and people are certainly buying fewer books, but the internet is a wealth of reading and provides a great deal of information which books were formerly used for. The encyclopedia, the center of the home library, is now mostly dated and biased in comparison to the wealth of information one can find online.

I do find it disturbing students are reading less books. I also find it disturbing how it seems the attention span of students has dropped over time. However, it seems to be indicative of people that have grown up in an information age where information gathering is stressed more than being thoroughly proficient in topics. I regularly find myself with ten tabs open in my web browser while I try to link many types of information together into a coherent synthesis. It seems to me that the great challenge we face as readers now is finding information. Our emphasis on this skill often makes our reading habits more shallow and broad than deep and narrow. A different kind of reading certainly and one with its own positives and negatives. Even in my post here you see the fruits of this information gathering perspective. I apologize for not bringing my charts and graphs to back myself up here.

Thanks, everyone, for the comments and to Nathan for filling in the missing links. Steve R. is right about the central premise of my piece. The NEA report never actually articulats its own understanding of what reading is, nor does it acknowledge the plurality of the activity of reading (and that's not just me talking out of my postmodern armchair--check out Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid for the cogntive take on what reading is and isn't). Like Nathan and Steve, I'd love to see people, especially kids, reading more; on the other hand (as I've said elsewhere), let me mention two words that never appear in the NEA report: Harry Potter.

Tangential question: where can I buy a postmodern armchair?

If you have to ask, you'll never know.