“culture that sees school as the development of our potential as human capital, rather than as, you know, humans.” I love this! I’m an Instructional Assistant for Special Ed 1st and 2nd grade and even there, or maybe especially there, the focus is on molding the kids to be easier to handle for everyone, not be trouble. Not on helping them to become the happiest, most fulfilled humans possible. I teach writing to them. We write about their passions, most recently SpongeBob and leprechauns. I love your view on education. Will subscribe!!
You are on point as usual. I also want to amplify what reading means (or might be allowed to mean by words-on-paper people like yours truly). Having made the great (or mistaken--potato/potahto) decision to study rhetoric, I learned that the essential processes of reading reach beyond decoding printed words. And anyone who comes from a marginalized group can tell us this.
As brown kids watching almost exclusively white TV shows in the 60s and 70s, my brothers and I “read” films, television, songs on the radio, visual and print ads, commercials, as well as white teachers, priests, parents of school friends, stores, and lots more. We saw the overt “texts” and read between the lines to find out who we could trust, what the code words said beyond the veneer of friendliness. I excelled in language arts early on not just because I looked at books, newspapers, and magazines but because I *always* knew there was more to the text. And I see quite young people now who can do the same *when they’re asked to in situations that mean something to them* which doesn’t happen nearly enough in our endlessly benchmark tested schools.
So I don’t think reading has gone anywhere. It’s just being applied to a wider variety of media. By the way, reading your writing stimulates my mind every time. Please keep at it.
This may be misguided because I am not American and don't fully understand the school board process, but if that board is elected, in what sense are their decisions not democratic?
This is a complicated question which involves unpacking what we mean by "democratic" and is very open to debate and interpretation. If we take the "democratic" rule means government reflecting the preferences of a majority while protecting the rights of minorities, we can see how some of what happens in a democracy may not be exactly democratic.
As we know from countries like Turkey, Iran, Russia and other authoritarian nations that elections by themselves don't mean we're in a democracy. In the US we've had several recent presidential elections where the candidate with the fewer votes won because of our system of the electoral college, which many argue is itself anti-democratic. Because of gerrymandering, the state of Wisconsin is effectively not functioning as a democracy as democrats would need to win something like 2/3's of the votes to achieve majority control in the legislature.
In the case of many of these school board races, we have a combination of low participation and a flood of funding from outside the community to push the M4L candidates, overwhelming the capacity of other candidates to compete.
Once on the boards these groups often ignore and abuse administrative procedures in a kind of deliberate blitz to create sudden, non-deliberative change in school districts. Some of this is technically within the "rules" while others aren't, but as we've seen in this country quite a bit in the last few years, there's lots of parts of our democracy that don't have clear, enforceable rules, and our judiciary, the group which is tasked as the final arbiter of these rules has been shaped (at the Supreme Court level and below) by anti-democratic practices.
Now, I think in most cases these radical school boards will ultimately be rejected by a public activated by their overreach, but in the meantime, lots of disruption and damage will be done. The purpose and function of the school board is to oversee the operations of the public schooling that is free to everyone, which to me requires those who are serving on boards to adhere to democratic ideals around collective compromise. M4L has instead made them partisan battlegrounds, which is very bad for everyone.
Thank you for the elaboration. I was using the term "democratic" in the narrower sense, hence the confusion. It seems there are a lot of things that need fixing - good luck to the Americans out there!
For what it’s worth, and even I am not sure that is very much-- I mostly agree with your point. But I do think Scott also has a point, even if he didn’t back it up so much as simply assert it, before flapping his arms about for a minute or two.
It may be that the Moms of Flapdoodle, or whomever, are not attacking reading so much as thinking. But while I suppose a Times writer ought to back up a statement like this better than I will, I don’t think it’s entirely correct to separate the two. Whether books are being removed from library shelves (the right, mostly) or from planned publication (the left, often), a TON of books are beinng attacked these days. It’s a big list, and it’s not only happening in right wing circles. And that doesn’t feel unrelated to our culture’s habit of avoiding serious reading.
I should emphasize: this piece of yours has led to me subscribing. Your stuff is good, as I’d heard somewhere. So I hope I didn’t overstate my position.
I don't think you've overstated at all. I'm of several minds about these things. On the one hand, it's hard not to look at these things and be concerned that some kind of new censoriousness is happening and it may be related to not enough people seeing enough value in serious (what Scott calls "lawful") reading.
On the other hand, Scott himself cites Rudolf Flesch's book on why Johnny can't read which was published in 1955, so it's definitely not new.
I had a whole thread on this that I started to explore, but cut because it's half baked and got long, but I think in general, these things are cyclical. At the same time, the route that circle travels changes as the underlying culture itself changes, so the specifics may be a bit different.
A big factor in the current cycle is the existence of a social media ecosystem that amps up the volume on so many of these controversies that would've once been primarily local, and generally not notable. We can have a daily proxy battle for our preferred ideology over whatever issue we wish. Books are a handy thing to fight over.
My urging to myself and others is to always try to peel back the issue and look underneath to see what structural factors may be driving these things. When it comes to kids and reading, my view is that any lack of phonics instruction is both hugely overstated and ultimately not a factor when it comes to something like the percentage of kids who read a book independently for pleasure. That issue, for me, is squarely on the nature of schooling where reading is a kind of medicine and done primarily to answer questions on an exam, rather than a fundamental human experience.
This is why I sometimes hesitate to draw a line like Scott does between the lawful and the chaotic. I think all reading is chaotic, to the extent that it's primarily an experience that should create engagement and pleasure. Those pleasures may shift depending on the kind of reading we're doing, or why we might be reading, but all of it is good, in my book.
Though, of course I'd feel that way, given what I spend my time doing.
I’m with you on all this. Perhaps the least hysterical interpretation is that the censoriousness can be seen as an unsurprising development in a non-reading culture, but there are things driving it that are only indirectly related to the erosion of reading for pleasure.
(Disclaimer: I’m about to waffle and backpedal, so I’ll try to keep it brief but will probably not try hard enough)
As we hash this out, I recall being annoyed that both my son’s grandmothers gave us children’s books that were essentially junk books designed to indoctrinate, and the indoctrination was ideologically diverse. It was irritating to look at his bookshelf and see Che Guevara for Kids, as well as William Bennett for Kids.
There was no way in hell I was going to read that kind of junk to my son. There were certainly a couple that were sweet, like the one about gay penguins, and we made an exception for that one. But for the most part I think giving kids stuff like that to read is one of the reasons they don’t read for pleasure.
The books he had to read in school were (at least one year I recall) almost exclusively stories about oppression, other cultures, etc. I’m a leftist, but I would have preferred the emphasis be on great writing and storytelling rather than stories that teach a lesson. I feel that way even when I’m on board with the lesson.
I suppose when you come right down to it, I’m irritated with everyone. Not with you, though. Thanks for the gracious and thoughtful response!
Maybe I'm a bit old-fashioned on this front, but when it comes to books, including books for kids (maybe especially books for kids) the first requirement is that they be a "good" book and that goodness is not 100% related to the message the book is trying to convey. I also believe we need diverse books and books that reflect the full range of the experience of life, but those books also must just be good books. The gay penguin book is, mostly, a good book. Well-illustrated, good writing that brings the lives of the characters alive on the page. It's good! Books that are designed to teach a lesson without care to the quality of other elements of the story are often not very good. When I was teaching college literature, I was very conscious of trying to provide students a range of world views in the texts they read, but the first requirement was always if I thought they would dig reading the book. That didn't mean pandering or choosing easy books. It just meant choosing good books.
Again, I’m with you. I very much like the idea of broadening student horizons with writing from other cultures, and a big chunk of my reading in recent years has been translations. But it’s the pandering I don’t love.
I think that insisting the books be good is the best way to get students excited about reading AND the best way to broaden their horizons. Ultimately, I think getting people excited about culture from elsewhere is a better and more meaningful way to develop their empathy. But the book or movie or music or whatever has to excite them first.
Maybe I'm oversimplifying a bit since I'm not familiar with A.O. Scott's other writing, but this sounds like the problem with an atomized analysis of everything, rather than a systemic view. It seems to me that many opinion writers struggle to understand or tie together various threads because they start from a base assumption that the current status quo is generally the best way to organize society and we just need to encourage people to read more, or some other individualistic solution. As you clearly point out, it's a deeper crisis of democracy and governance. These analyses thus necessarily lack an understanding of power in the concrete way it is used and give the false equivalencies between abuse of government power (on the right) and vocal critique which sometimes brings consequences in a way that has happened for as long as people had social relationships (both the left and the right).
I think you're on to something vis a vis a certain status quo bias. This is particularly evident at the Times, which makes sense as they are, very consciously, an institutional arbiter of the status quo. (Literally "the paper of record.")
There's all kinds of nods in Scott's piece that he knows his own thesis doesn't quite add up, but he commits to it anyway. The belief that things used to be better when they were more familiar or comfortable for a particular or person or group is hard to escape without a pretty concerted effort to take a step or two back and ask what else might be going on.
Thanks for the reply. I've been following you for a while and I appreciate how respectful you are toward the people you disagree with. That's something I'm working on for myself haha. I'm sure there are plenty of incentive structures motivating putting out pieces like the one referenced above and I'd love to see those change in favor of more in-depth reporting and critical analysis.
That's very nice of you to say. I like to talk to people about this stuff. I try to respond to good faith with good faith, and then also call out what seems to be bad faith. At one of my other gigs (blogging at Inside Higher Ed) I used to spend a lot of time in the comments discussing/arguing with readers, and really benefitted from it. I think I was the only contributor who was sad when the comments were discontinued. (Though I certainly understood why, given the sheer volume of not good faith stuff that showed up in the comments.) It can be very hard to maintain a space where the conversation is productive.
I could drop by to quote the same three things I always quote on this newsletter, but instead I’ll just point you and anyone else who hasn’t encountered it to Emily Knox’s work on book challenges and censorship, which has expanded and clarified my thinking about books, reading, book bans, and many other topics touched on here. Available in podcast form and in words on pixels or paper via the show notes: https://www.librarypunk.gay/e/065-book-challenges-with-emily-knox/.
Is your Mom still on Chicago’s North Shore? Happy Birthday to her!
“culture that sees school as the development of our potential as human capital, rather than as, you know, humans.” I love this! I’m an Instructional Assistant for Special Ed 1st and 2nd grade and even there, or maybe especially there, the focus is on molding the kids to be easier to handle for everyone, not be trouble. Not on helping them to become the happiest, most fulfilled humans possible. I teach writing to them. We write about their passions, most recently SpongeBob and leprechauns. I love your view on education. Will subscribe!!
Getting students started by writing from passion will pay off in the long run. Keep that up!
You are on point as usual. I also want to amplify what reading means (or might be allowed to mean by words-on-paper people like yours truly). Having made the great (or mistaken--potato/potahto) decision to study rhetoric, I learned that the essential processes of reading reach beyond decoding printed words. And anyone who comes from a marginalized group can tell us this.
As brown kids watching almost exclusively white TV shows in the 60s and 70s, my brothers and I “read” films, television, songs on the radio, visual and print ads, commercials, as well as white teachers, priests, parents of school friends, stores, and lots more. We saw the overt “texts” and read between the lines to find out who we could trust, what the code words said beyond the veneer of friendliness. I excelled in language arts early on not just because I looked at books, newspapers, and magazines but because I *always* knew there was more to the text. And I see quite young people now who can do the same *when they’re asked to in situations that mean something to them* which doesn’t happen nearly enough in our endlessly benchmark tested schools.
So I don’t think reading has gone anywhere. It’s just being applied to a wider variety of media. By the way, reading your writing stimulates my mind every time. Please keep at it.
This may be misguided because I am not American and don't fully understand the school board process, but if that board is elected, in what sense are their decisions not democratic?
This is a complicated question which involves unpacking what we mean by "democratic" and is very open to debate and interpretation. If we take the "democratic" rule means government reflecting the preferences of a majority while protecting the rights of minorities, we can see how some of what happens in a democracy may not be exactly democratic.
As we know from countries like Turkey, Iran, Russia and other authoritarian nations that elections by themselves don't mean we're in a democracy. In the US we've had several recent presidential elections where the candidate with the fewer votes won because of our system of the electoral college, which many argue is itself anti-democratic. Because of gerrymandering, the state of Wisconsin is effectively not functioning as a democracy as democrats would need to win something like 2/3's of the votes to achieve majority control in the legislature.
In the case of many of these school board races, we have a combination of low participation and a flood of funding from outside the community to push the M4L candidates, overwhelming the capacity of other candidates to compete.
Once on the boards these groups often ignore and abuse administrative procedures in a kind of deliberate blitz to create sudden, non-deliberative change in school districts. Some of this is technically within the "rules" while others aren't, but as we've seen in this country quite a bit in the last few years, there's lots of parts of our democracy that don't have clear, enforceable rules, and our judiciary, the group which is tasked as the final arbiter of these rules has been shaped (at the Supreme Court level and below) by anti-democratic practices.
Now, I think in most cases these radical school boards will ultimately be rejected by a public activated by their overreach, but in the meantime, lots of disruption and damage will be done. The purpose and function of the school board is to oversee the operations of the public schooling that is free to everyone, which to me requires those who are serving on boards to adhere to democratic ideals around collective compromise. M4L has instead made them partisan battlegrounds, which is very bad for everyone.
Thank you for the elaboration. I was using the term "democratic" in the narrower sense, hence the confusion. It seems there are a lot of things that need fixing - good luck to the Americans out there!
For what it’s worth, and even I am not sure that is very much-- I mostly agree with your point. But I do think Scott also has a point, even if he didn’t back it up so much as simply assert it, before flapping his arms about for a minute or two.
It may be that the Moms of Flapdoodle, or whomever, are not attacking reading so much as thinking. But while I suppose a Times writer ought to back up a statement like this better than I will, I don’t think it’s entirely correct to separate the two. Whether books are being removed from library shelves (the right, mostly) or from planned publication (the left, often), a TON of books are beinng attacked these days. It’s a big list, and it’s not only happening in right wing circles. And that doesn’t feel unrelated to our culture’s habit of avoiding serious reading.
I should emphasize: this piece of yours has led to me subscribing. Your stuff is good, as I’d heard somewhere. So I hope I didn’t overstate my position.
I don't think you've overstated at all. I'm of several minds about these things. On the one hand, it's hard not to look at these things and be concerned that some kind of new censoriousness is happening and it may be related to not enough people seeing enough value in serious (what Scott calls "lawful") reading.
On the other hand, Scott himself cites Rudolf Flesch's book on why Johnny can't read which was published in 1955, so it's definitely not new.
I had a whole thread on this that I started to explore, but cut because it's half baked and got long, but I think in general, these things are cyclical. At the same time, the route that circle travels changes as the underlying culture itself changes, so the specifics may be a bit different.
A big factor in the current cycle is the existence of a social media ecosystem that amps up the volume on so many of these controversies that would've once been primarily local, and generally not notable. We can have a daily proxy battle for our preferred ideology over whatever issue we wish. Books are a handy thing to fight over.
My urging to myself and others is to always try to peel back the issue and look underneath to see what structural factors may be driving these things. When it comes to kids and reading, my view is that any lack of phonics instruction is both hugely overstated and ultimately not a factor when it comes to something like the percentage of kids who read a book independently for pleasure. That issue, for me, is squarely on the nature of schooling where reading is a kind of medicine and done primarily to answer questions on an exam, rather than a fundamental human experience.
This is why I sometimes hesitate to draw a line like Scott does between the lawful and the chaotic. I think all reading is chaotic, to the extent that it's primarily an experience that should create engagement and pleasure. Those pleasures may shift depending on the kind of reading we're doing, or why we might be reading, but all of it is good, in my book.
Though, of course I'd feel that way, given what I spend my time doing.
I’m with you on all this. Perhaps the least hysterical interpretation is that the censoriousness can be seen as an unsurprising development in a non-reading culture, but there are things driving it that are only indirectly related to the erosion of reading for pleasure.
(Disclaimer: I’m about to waffle and backpedal, so I’ll try to keep it brief but will probably not try hard enough)
As we hash this out, I recall being annoyed that both my son’s grandmothers gave us children’s books that were essentially junk books designed to indoctrinate, and the indoctrination was ideologically diverse. It was irritating to look at his bookshelf and see Che Guevara for Kids, as well as William Bennett for Kids.
There was no way in hell I was going to read that kind of junk to my son. There were certainly a couple that were sweet, like the one about gay penguins, and we made an exception for that one. But for the most part I think giving kids stuff like that to read is one of the reasons they don’t read for pleasure.
The books he had to read in school were (at least one year I recall) almost exclusively stories about oppression, other cultures, etc. I’m a leftist, but I would have preferred the emphasis be on great writing and storytelling rather than stories that teach a lesson. I feel that way even when I’m on board with the lesson.
I suppose when you come right down to it, I’m irritated with everyone. Not with you, though. Thanks for the gracious and thoughtful response!
Maybe I'm a bit old-fashioned on this front, but when it comes to books, including books for kids (maybe especially books for kids) the first requirement is that they be a "good" book and that goodness is not 100% related to the message the book is trying to convey. I also believe we need diverse books and books that reflect the full range of the experience of life, but those books also must just be good books. The gay penguin book is, mostly, a good book. Well-illustrated, good writing that brings the lives of the characters alive on the page. It's good! Books that are designed to teach a lesson without care to the quality of other elements of the story are often not very good. When I was teaching college literature, I was very conscious of trying to provide students a range of world views in the texts they read, but the first requirement was always if I thought they would dig reading the book. That didn't mean pandering or choosing easy books. It just meant choosing good books.
Again, I’m with you. I very much like the idea of broadening student horizons with writing from other cultures, and a big chunk of my reading in recent years has been translations. But it’s the pandering I don’t love.
I think that insisting the books be good is the best way to get students excited about reading AND the best way to broaden their horizons. Ultimately, I think getting people excited about culture from elsewhere is a better and more meaningful way to develop their empathy. But the book or movie or music or whatever has to excite them first.
This Jay Caspian Kang piece from a while back might resonate with you. I think it's a good analysis of these issues with some specific illustrations. It's a gift link so the URL is going to be goofy, but folks can cut and paste and it should work. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/13/opinion/antiracist-childrens-books.html?unlocked_article_code=6UQrwhlFFdG1k-m5GgEYWTUnEq8rGx6ijj6rIpJK_RNWIWEf6lA5ly3wopbpfWDeNEjLW04ZqFpVizIbqlZAEM5STLG6nOkqwkk5i8A9AzaoSJCtWbx3L65-9f4bKZlYgLi3yob8R3ci3oA_5El429y6WP1fQtycQnGGStEMos4KH7eb6nbdC1vJsIdTLqbfNupu6p9g65Lh-IyP9VKHj6FbjQMVGt5Swt6F2On6R9V7D8chE-YgXSjcliJ-TobyIVUtEAwazlq66vQTgGOGLvstViDAR8LDeD8sVKsEESkiDQ_7wrBOUMn8GfbYOQLCfJ981zT_gndYxnVOiJNeGTfvdik&smid=url-share
Thanks, I’ll check it out!
Yes, good article!
Maybe I'm oversimplifying a bit since I'm not familiar with A.O. Scott's other writing, but this sounds like the problem with an atomized analysis of everything, rather than a systemic view. It seems to me that many opinion writers struggle to understand or tie together various threads because they start from a base assumption that the current status quo is generally the best way to organize society and we just need to encourage people to read more, or some other individualistic solution. As you clearly point out, it's a deeper crisis of democracy and governance. These analyses thus necessarily lack an understanding of power in the concrete way it is used and give the false equivalencies between abuse of government power (on the right) and vocal critique which sometimes brings consequences in a way that has happened for as long as people had social relationships (both the left and the right).
I think you're on to something vis a vis a certain status quo bias. This is particularly evident at the Times, which makes sense as they are, very consciously, an institutional arbiter of the status quo. (Literally "the paper of record.")
There's all kinds of nods in Scott's piece that he knows his own thesis doesn't quite add up, but he commits to it anyway. The belief that things used to be better when they were more familiar or comfortable for a particular or person or group is hard to escape without a pretty concerted effort to take a step or two back and ask what else might be going on.
Thanks for the reply. I've been following you for a while and I appreciate how respectful you are toward the people you disagree with. That's something I'm working on for myself haha. I'm sure there are plenty of incentive structures motivating putting out pieces like the one referenced above and I'd love to see those change in favor of more in-depth reporting and critical analysis.
That's very nice of you to say. I like to talk to people about this stuff. I try to respond to good faith with good faith, and then also call out what seems to be bad faith. At one of my other gigs (blogging at Inside Higher Ed) I used to spend a lot of time in the comments discussing/arguing with readers, and really benefitted from it. I think I was the only contributor who was sad when the comments were discontinued. (Though I certainly understood why, given the sheer volume of not good faith stuff that showed up in the comments.) It can be very hard to maintain a space where the conversation is productive.
I could drop by to quote the same three things I always quote on this newsletter, but instead I’ll just point you and anyone else who hasn’t encountered it to Emily Knox’s work on book challenges and censorship, which has expanded and clarified my thinking about books, reading, book bans, and many other topics touched on here. Available in podcast form and in words on pixels or paper via the show notes: https://www.librarypunk.gay/e/065-book-challenges-with-emily-knox/.