133t Speak

Grandpa: Again with the fucking chicken?
Richard: Dad
Grandpa: It's always the goddamn fucking chicken
--Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

Going through the motions
Losing all my drive
I can't even see
If this is really me
--Going Through the Motions,
Once More With Feeling (2002)
__________

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) released a meta study today expanding upon their 2004 report on the declining state of literacy in the U.S., "Reading at Risk" ("To Read or Not to Read")

"Americans are reading less and their reading proficiency is declining at troubling rates [the report said.] The trend is particularly strong among older teens and young adults, and if it is not reversed, the NEA report suggests, it will have a profound negative effect on the nation's economic and civic future.

"This is really alarming data," said NEA Chairman Dana Gioia. "Luckily, we still have an opportunity to address it, but if we wait 10, 20 years, I think it may be too late."

"In an increasingly competitive world, the consequences of doing it badly include 'economic decline.'" Non-readers are less well-integrated into society; they suffer by almost all markers of health and prosperity. Keep this trend of your society in mind the next time a packet of $80 billion dollars goes flying from the U.S. tax coffers into the Middle East.

Mr. Bush's middling school initiative "No Child Left Behind" is leaving many children burned out and minimally functional automatons, products of teachers who are on an annual treadmill of teaching to a test. The majority of students will have passed their competencies, having jumped through the hoops, and will receive a certificate at the end, but they will not be discriminating thinkers.

Some migh see discrimination and critical thinking is an undesirable quality in an electorate; they become restive in the face of incongruities. On the other hand, hoop-jumping is a fine skill to possess for installing oneself successfully within a system. In fact, the Founding Fathers, an elite themselves, probably did not think the hoi polloi needed much beyond a sixth grade education. (Of course, 6th grade back then probably equates to 10th grade today.)

"The story the numbers tell, Gioia said, can be summed up in about four sentences":

"'We are doing a better job of teaching kids to read in elementary school. But once they enter adolescence, they fall victim to a general culture which does not encourage or reinforce reading. Because these people then read less, they read less well. Because they read less well, they do more poorly in school, in the job market and in civic life.'"

HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman says her company is "very much into the digital side of the business," and when it comes to a customer's choice of format says, "I don't care. Reading is reading."

English professor Matthew Kirschenbaum said last week the NEA report didn't account for "the different ways in which we read." So, "reading is reading," even when it is just listening.

This begins to sound like a report from The Onion.

I remember the rhetoric from my education classes. In the community of learners there are differing modalities of learning. Some learn kinesthetically, something which mystified me, leaving me guessing that meant something like while turning cartwheels, or maybe while watching someone perform song and dance. Which is not to say those things can't be entertaining or enriching. It is just that hey are not reading.

Maybe everything is not taken into consideration in the 7-10 minutes per day the study shows the average 15-24 year old to be engaged in "voluntarily reading anything at all." If we added in time spent reading menus and Xbox instructions and road signs, we'd probably find people read more than 7 minutes in a day. But it is not the eye movement and letter recognition alone which qualifies as a meaningful engagement with text.

Life is lived fast today, and I see the loss of expression among some of my communicants. Talking points stand in the stead of well-constructed thoughts and ideas. Who has time? So the universal communication mimics the shorthand of email, with only the most essential data being communicated. Speculation, flights of the imagination. . .these things fall by the wayside on the information highway, where a toolbox of acronyms covers the gamut of intentions.

So, things get done, and perhaps efficaciously, but with little charm or flair. The grinding regularity of the bucket of takeout chicken and liters of soda for dinner in the film "Little Miss Sunshine" is symbolic of this loss of creativity and expression. One of the children has gone intentionally mute, while the father strives to create the ultimate power point systemization of a life. He lives by sound bytes, a la Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

But "get 'er done" is not the same thing as doing it well, or with feeling.

Maybe there's 2MI today; 404. T+, TTFN. G2G.

--Lisa