Regarding your recent post on reading and media, I would be curious for your thoughts about my observations teaching junior high and high school for the last few decades.
I (and some of my other colleagues) have noticed the following:
1. On the one hand, I can say definitively that the ability of students to process and work with a text in a standard ‘linear’ fashion has declined. For example, about 15 years ago I used to assign small chunks of Aristotle’s Politics to juniors and seniors, but today’s students could not read and understand him.
2. On the other hand . . . the ability of students to find patterns or links between texts has increased substantially. Just this past semester I taught a theology class to 9th-10th graders and wanted to introduce them to typological and patterned thinking. I was shocked how fast they picked this up, and many very quickly found plenty of connections in the text that I did not see. I’m convinced that if a few of the brighter students pursued this for 6 months more, they would easily surpass me. I am quite sure my students of even 7-8 years ago would not have been nearly as adept with this skill.
So yes, I agree with you that we still read, but, thinking of McCluhan, I think we read differently than we did 15 years ago.
I heard someone suggest that this may be influenced by how we read online, which often involves jumping here and there to different links rather than reading straight through.
