Reading and writing
Leonard Ernsbarger's well-researched column, "Reading in the Classrooms," in Wednesday's Nevada Daily Mail, was extremely interesting to me. For one thing, I've recently retired from Cottey College, where I spent 31 years "teaching writing," by which I mean not the explicit meanings of the English words on the page, which college students that age have pretty well mastered, but the implicit meanings or suggestions of those words -- which can make all the difference between negative and positive, harsh and easy-going, hostile and friendly. One of the many things I learned in all those years was that no one, absolutely no one, in all honesty, can say he's "mastered" the art of writing. You never learn something as effectively as when you teach it, but no one has nothing to learn about writing.
Knowing Leonard Ernsbarger personally for more than three decades, I wasn't surprised, last week, by the up-beat tone of his editorial, "Reading in the Classrooms." If I were a beginning teacher, I'd want Leonard to evaluate my classroom teaching. But if you think all this is just a come-on to another nasty column of mine, you're dead wrong. I believed everything Leonard wrote. From his column, I think Nevada's grade school students are lucky to have Nevada's grade school teachers to teach our kids how to read and write.
My question is, how come we newspaper readers keep getting inundated by stories from across the country about the abysmal writing scores racked up by American grade school kids? What's the difference between today's education world and the world in place when I was their age?
When I was a kid -- OK, this is the Andy Rooney segment of my column -- in the late 1940s, my father wouldn't allow a new-fangled TV set in our house, because, as he said, it would kill all conversation in the house. Well, the only radio show I wanted to listen to was the 15-minute-long "Lone Ranger" on Wednesday night at 7:30, and I couldn't go out and play softball in the lot across the street in the winter. That left a lot of evening for us kids to fill, even if our mothers wanted us to go to bed by 9. I don't, at age 65, recall exactly how I spent that time. I, for one, had to wait until I was 6 before having a baby sister to bedevil.
I do recall my parents reading. About once a week, my mother sent me on a modest walk to the nearby village of Larchmont, and, specifically, to Womrath's lending library, then a national chain, to select for her a Harper's Mystery novel that you could rent weekly for a nominal fee.
She read the Daily News, "the Picture Newspaper," each morning. My father, on the other hand, read the New York Times or Herald Tribune (now unhappily defunct), in the morning, and the World Telegram each night. In addition, when I was small, I remember our mailman delivering to our door, on a monthly basis, a package from the "Heritage Club" that, when my father returned from work and opened it, turned out to be an attractively bound book--not just any book, but a "classic." I don't remember my father reading these volumes as quickly as they arrived in the mail at the house, he read popular novels as well. But I remember thinking that maybe he subscribed to these pretty books as something to pass along to his kids after he died. And so it turned out to be.
I don't remember when I learned how to read.
I don't remember when I learned how to write.
The only thing I remember about the latter was, on a Sunday morning, lying on my stomach on the livingroom floor, starting to write a story and getting as far as the end of my first thought, and wondering, How do I show the end of a thought?
My answer: maybe place a straight vertical line at the end of that thought that passes through the line on which the sentence sits.
From that moment until this one, I've always loved the act of writing.
Maybe my father turned out to be sort of correct. Television didn't kill off conversation in our house; conversation was by that time more or less terminal anyway. But it killed off the dinner hour as a time when the family got together as a civilized, rules-abiding unit. To this day, I remember my daughter Jessica's friend Sandy Turpin had to be home by a certain hour in the evening, when she was a child, because her mother had let it be known in her family that there would be no excuses for missing the evening meal, perhaps the only time in the day when all family members could relax and communicate with each other. I wish I'd issued such an ultimatum when Jessica was a tot.
Is TV responsible for declining SAT scores? If the experts could make the connection stick, then maybe someone equally bright could devise a way to correct the problem--a daily literacy pill, for example. But that's not in the future, is it?
TV, movies on VHS, rock music on radio -- reading and writing, through the wonders of electronics, have suffered a terrible loss of prestige. My father once told me that one of the things he considered in buying the house in Larchmont where I grew up was the handsome built-in oak bookcases that lined the north wall of our first-floor livingroom. These days, I'd guess most houses are constructed without any built-in bookcases at all. Only a handful of us fruitcakes read much these days. And if we do, it's only an occasional article from Reader's Digest or a quick- reading Harlequin romance novel. People talk about the notorious "dumbing-down" of children's textbooks, as if it were a recent phenomenon, when, in fact, it goes back a few decades. I remember, for example, being issued an edition of Homer's "The Odyssey," when I was a student at Albert Leonard Junior High in New Rochelle, N.Y. While the teacher distributed copies to all my fellow students, I happened to read the notice inside the front cover, which informed the teacher that the following was an edition of the great classic that was being retold in "modern English" for those students who were still having some difficulty reading complex works of English prose. I was about to read a "Classics Illustrated" comic without the pictures. For a moment I felt as if I'd been demoted into a remedial English class, and I wanted to hurl the book into the wastepaper basket.
At that moment, which remains vividly in my memory after fully half a century, I decided I would never read a work of literature that didn't in some way challenge my mind. If you're not stretching your mind and imagination, you're not learning anything. And if you're not learning anything, what's the point.
In the movie "Fahrenheit 451," the political masters of a repressive regime send their operatives out in fire trucks, not to put out any fires, but to start them among contraband books being stashed in citizens' attics. Writer Ray Bradbury's point is that great literature is always unsettling, subversive, and that a dictatorship will always seek out and destroy the very source of that threat to its continued existence. In the U.S., it's fairly easy to forecast that in our society, books will not be burned, they'll simply turn to dust, unread.
I grew up listening to political candidates, from Franklin Roosevelt to Adlai Stevenson, speak in carefully organized and spoken speeches that were themselves artful and masterful compositions.
These days, our president can't even lie in complete sentences.