Informed People Learn From Reading Not From Their Entertainment.
While Frederick Douglass was in servitude as a slave in the south, he learned how powerful the ability to read was and saw it as the path to freedom. According to a Pew Research Center Poll 23% of Americans didn’t read a book, even just a few pages (including print, electronic, and audio formats) in a year when Americans were forced to stay home due to lockdown mandates (2020). The poll further breaks it down by demographics stating that nearly 40% who obtained high school diplomas or less education weren’t reading books in any format compared to only 11% of those with a Bachelor’s degree or higher education. The poll also asserted that those making a household income less than $30,000 per year are less likely to read books than those earning $75,000 or greater. Reading over the post and the data provided, one might think that only certain groups of people read, while others don’t, depending on their race and income. However, I ask everyone I meet if they read books, and I am not getting the same results. Regardless of income and race, the results vary individual to individual, and as far as I can tell, there is not a demographic group they all belong to. Some people read books, most don’t. Yet when you look at reports the Department of Education puts out, they claim that “four in five U.S. adults (79 percent) have English literacy skills sufficient to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences.” Which means 21% of adults can’t even comprehend what they read if they were to. Why would anyone read if they can’t understand what they are reading? I would argue that understanding what you read is actually an essential component of being able to read, since it is the actual purpose of reading to begin with. But taking these polls at face value, how do these two polls reconcile? If 21% of all adults regardless of race, sex, and income, aren’t intelligent enough to understand what they are reading even though they are capable of reading, and 23% of Americans didn’t read a book in 2020, that would mean only 2% of adults that are capable of actually reading chose not to read books in 2020. Does that sound right to you?
Do People Not Know How To Read Or… Do They Just Not Want To?
Based on my personal experience, it doesn’t to me. When reading about how the Pew Research Center conducted the poll we can find the following clarification: “For this analysis, we surveyed 1,502 U.S. adults from Jan. 25 to Feb. 8, 2021, by cellphone and landline phone.” Reading this I received an epiphany. I don’t chat with telemarketers, so that eliminates people like me right away which makes the sample not so random anymore. If you don’t have a random sample of people to participate in the study than you cannot reasonably extrapolate your results. Put simply, the poll has no merit. As for the Department of Education’s study, they clarify in fine print that they are “using the data from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC)… Respondents were first asked questions about their background, with an option to be interviewed in English or Spanish, followed by a skills assessment in English. Because the skills assessment was conducted only in English, all U.S. PIAAC literacy results are for English literacy.” Another moment of clarification, it sounds more like people who don’t use English as a first language are being sampled on their English literacy skills, as opposed to a random sample of American adults. So it is not that 21% of adults in America have such a low IQ they can’t understand what they are reading, rather it sounds more like a literacy study on assimilating Americans. Which makes me wonder why the study is titled “Adult Literacy in the United Sates.” The survey is describing what would happen if I read a Spanish book and was asked about what I read. I could read it, but I don’t know Spanish well enough to understand what I read. People aren’t this stupid, but they are gullible if they believe that we have a serious illiteracy problem in the United States. Both the Pew Research Center and the Department of Education must prove they need more funding, or else they won’t get more funding. As for normal people i.e., people who don’t have a conflict of interest and just are curious about the truth, you and I, when is the last time you met someone who couldn’t read? Based on my interactions, the problem isn’t that people don’t know how to read, it is that people don’t want to.
Have people forgotten the wisdom that Frederick Douglass learned to gain his freedom? Do people not know the axiom: “the man who knows how to read and chooses not to has no advantage over the illiterate”? Or are people just too busy being entertained rather than pursuing continuing personal education? “According to the A.C. Nielsen Co., the average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day (or 28 hours/week, or 2 months of nonstop TV-watching per year).” This information is gathered from a sample of people who opt into allowing the company to place a metering device in their home which gathers the data, and the participants are more likely to opt in since they are compensated. Still, one could make an argument for the sample not being so random as people can opt out. Nevertheless, while these polls show that Americans are more eager to watch television than pick up a book and read it, my personal polls are much lower. Jaws drop when I tell people I read 75 books last year. But everyone I know has a show recommendation they binged watched. Do you? I do too…
Still, I have to laugh at Groucho Marx’s shared sentiment:
“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”
I fear that I spend more time with the dead, reading the books written by those passed, than I do the living, as the information the living want to talk about comes primarily from their entertainment. Have you ever experienced the following situation? An acquaintance or friend will bring up a topic acting as though they are expert on the subject which you yourself saw a news piece about that morning. If it’s on one news network it happens to be on all of them, yet this person seems to not understand that yet and is acting privy to the information. This person portrays themselves as though they have spent several months studying and contemplating complex topics to form this new opinion which no one else has. They love the attention I am giving them by listening and perhaps admiring them for their efforts to have such great new insight into the subject I know nothing about. Only the opinion is the same as the author of the news piece I saw earlier. It is almost like playing the telephone game listening to this person do a poor job parroting the newscast. But sadly, it isn’t a game to this person. This person is passionate about this topic as if they feel educated in the subject now, though they never would have even thought on this issue had it not been shown in their entertainment. If you ask them a disrupting question in the midst of them repeating the main points as slogans, they shrug it off as if the question is irrelevant, as it was never addressed during the show they watched. And get upset if you interrupt with any controversial ideas which would deviate from the message. They prefer to avoid discussion and debate and just repeat what they now know. If you put forward skeptical arguments, they get upset without elaborating on the integrity of their (really the unknown author’s) original statements. They haven’t formed their own opinion or fought for it in an argument before which to them would be unnecessary conflict and confrontation which they prefer to avoid, as they have the facts because they trust their entertainment more than an encyclopedia. They want to watch the drama not be a part of it. Unfortunately, few things are actually factual. As Dorothy L. Sayers put it “Facts are like cows. If you look them in the face long enough, they generally run away.” Most “facts” are really just ideas. Most ideas, even our own, are really bad ideas, especially when our ideas are really just unfiltered ideas copied from someone else. Fortunately, bad ideas get sifted out through intellectual discourse, for those willing to have it.
People Are Conflating Their Entertainment For Education
Worst of all, is the notion that complex topics may be condensed and entertaining. Before I make statements about how knowledge is obtained and processed on an individual level, I would like to use the example of a man who wanted to start a private space program and had difficulty hiring the best engineers he could find. They didn’t want to work for him, and the worst engineers who were willing, he didn’t want to hire. He wanted somebody better, but since he couldn’t find anyone willing and able he stepped in and fulfilled the role himself. During an interview on 60 minutes, Elon Musk was asked by Scott Pelley “How did you get the expertise to be the chief technology officer of a rocket ship company?” to which he responded “I do have a physics background, that’s helpful as a foundation. And then I read a lot of books and talked to a lot of smart people.” Pelley interjected “You’re self-taught?!” “Yeah. Well self-taught yes meaning I don’t have an aerospace degree.” So how did you go about acquiring the knowledge?” While chuckling, most likely by the fact he must explain how one can independently acquire knowledge for themselves, Musk responds “Well, like I said, I read a lot of books, talked to a lot of people and have a great team.” Elon Musk understands something most people don’t: he himself is in charge of his own education or lack of it.
To dive deeply into subject matter, one should learn what the experts already have in order to build a proper foundational knowledge. In order to do that, one would have to study by having conversations with living experts which can only provide so much depth, and so to really get in the trenches one must read books from present and past experts which hold more in-depth study and data than a conversation can. Regardless of format, one should all the while think critically of the information in order to process it for themselves. Further, one who really wants to expand their knowledge, would expose themselves to opposing views, which there always are in every subject and profession. During a speech at Cambridge University, Jordan Peterson explained the importance of the exchange of information for an individual to make personal progress from a standpoint of a clinical psychologist: “The exchange of information…in a state of relative freedom, the revelation of those thoughts, and then the discursive analysis of those thoughts say, and then the implementation into action and the testing of them, that is the pathway to health.“ Now he is specifically talking about helping a patient as a psychologist by listening to the patient and letting them speak their mind freely to unravel their thoughts and hopefully think their way out of the psychological prison they have made for themselves. But whether he intended to or not, here he states the key for personal progress. The exchange and exposure of information and ideas, the pursuit of revelation from those ideas by further analysis, discussion, and contradiction, to prove the merit of new ideas and then turning those thoughts into action, further testing those ideas. Why this sounds just like what an entrepreneur does in creating a business, but is the core to personal development. Most importantly Peterson made the assertion that free speech is “identical with freedom of thought…not just another freedom or right among many.” Which is interesting because the majority of his speech was about active listening. Ray Dalio wrote “It is more inconsiderate to prevent people from exercising their rights because you are offended by them, then it is for them to do whatever it is that offends you.” In this case speak their mind. But is there any other way to escape the limits of one’s own mind?
Book Recommendation: Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves To Death
In his book “Amusing Ourselves to Death, public discourse in the age of show business”, Neil Postman discusses this current predicament of choosing to be entertained over educated and worse confusing entertainment for education. It started with Sesame Street, a show that educators everywhere were on board with. Over time it has become obvious that the show only educated kids to be entertained rather than made education entertaining (my words not his). If you disagree, hear out his compelling argument in the following excerpt found in Chapter 10, “Teaching as an Amusing Activity”:
We now know that “Sesame Street” encourages children to love school only if school is like “Sesame Street”. Which is to say, we now know that “Sesame Street” undermines what the traditional idea of schooling represents. Whereas a classroom is a place of social interaction, the space in front of a television set is a private preserve. Whereas in a classroom, one may ask a teacher questions, one can ask nothing of a television screen. Whereas school is centered on the development of language, television demands attention to images. Whereas attending school is a legal requirement, watching television is an act of choice. Whereas in school, one fails to attend to the teacher at the risk of punishment, no penalties exist for failing to attend to the television screen. Whereas to behave oneself in school means to observe rules of public decorum, television watching requires no such observances, has no concept of public decorum. Whereas in a classroom, fun is never more than a means to an end, on television it is the end in itself.
Yet “Sesame Street” and its progeny, “The Electric Company”, are not to be blamed for laughing the traditional classroom out of existence. If the classroom now begins to seem a stale and flat environment for learning, the inventors of television itself are to blame, not the Children’s Television Workshop. We can hardly expect those who want to make good television shows to concern themselves with what the classroom is for. They are concerned with what television is for. This does not mean that “Sesame Street” is not educational. It is, in fact, nothing but educational – in the sense that every television show is educational. Just as reading a book – any kind of book – promotes a particular orientation toward learning, watching a television show does the same. “The Little House on the Prairie,” “Cheers and “The Tonight Show” are as effective as “Sesame Street” in promoting what might be called the television style of learning. And this style of learning is, by its nature, hostile to what has been called book-learning or its handmaiden, school-learning. If we are to blame “Sesame Street” for anything, it is for the pretense that it is any ally of the classroom. That, after all, has been its chief claim on foundation and public money. As a television show, and a good one, “Sesame Street” does not encourage children to love school or anything about school. It encourages them to love television.
Moreover, it is important to add that whether or not “Sesame Street” teaches children their letters and numbers is entirely irrelevant. We may take as our guide here John Dewey’s observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about the learning. As he wrote in Experience and Education: “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes…may be an often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history… For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.” In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns. As Dewey wrote in another place, we learn what we do. Television educates by teaching children to do what television-viewing requires of them. And that is as precisely remote from what a classroom requires of them as reading a book is from watching a stage show…
The classroom is, at the moment, still tied to the printed word, although that connection is rapidly weakening. Meanwhile, television forges ahead, making no concessions to its great technological predecessor, creating new conceptions of knowledge and how it is acquired. One is entirely justified in saying that the major educational enterprise now being undertaken in the United States is not happening in its classrooms but in the home, in front of the television set, and under the jurisdiction not of school administrators and teachers but of network executives and entertainers. I don’t mean to imply that the situation is a result of a conspiracy or even that those who control television want this responsibility. I mean only to say that, like the alphabet or the printing press, television has but its power to control the time, attention and cognitive habits of our youth gained the power to control their education.
Later in the same chapter Neil Postman discusses what he calls the three commandments of television. Here are a few excerpts from them.
Every television program must be a complete package in itself. No previous knowledge is to be required…Television is a nongraded curriculum and excludes no viewer for any reason, at any time. In other words, in doing away with the idea of sequence and continuity in education, television undermines the idea that sequence and continuity have anything to do with thought itself…
In television teaching, perplexity is a superhighway to low ratings. A perplexed learner is a learner who will turn to another station. This means that there must be nothing that has to be remembered, studied, applied or, worst of all, endured. It is assumed that any information, story or idea can be made immediately accessible, since the contentment, not the growth, of the learner is paramount…
Of all the enemies of television-teaching, including continuity and perplexity, none is more formidable than exposition. Arguments, hypotheses, discussions, reasons, refutations, or any of the traditional instruments of reasoned discourse turn television into radio or, worse, third-rate printed matter…The name we may properly give to an education without prerequisites, perplexity and exposition is entertainment.
But what about our friends and acquaintances who are instant experts parroting the news to us as though we will never see programs mentioning the very stories they are repeating? Are they educated now? The book cites research on this very phenomenon from both sides, I am going to read the side that the author agrees with. If you want to learn about the other side, you will have to read the book yourself, which I would highly recommend.
Jacoby found…that only 3.5 percent of viewers were able to answer successfully twelve true/false questions concerning two thirty-second segments of commercial television programs and advertisements. Stauffer found in studying students’ responses to a news program transmitted via television, radio, and print, that print significantly increased correct responses to questions regarding the names and people and numbers contained in the material. Stern reported that 51 percent of viewers could not recall a single item of news a few minutes after viewing a news program on television. Wilson found that the average television viewer could retain only 20 percent of the information contained in a fictional televised news story. Katz found that 21 percent of television viewers could not recall any new items within one hour of broadcast. On the basis of his and other studies, Salomon has concluded that “the meanings secured from television are more likely to be segmented, concrete and less inferential, and those secured from reading have a higher likelihood of being better tied to one’s stored knowledge and thus are more likely to be inferential.” In other words, so far as many reputable studies are concerned, television viewing does not significantly increase learning, is inferior to and less likely than print to cultivate higher-order, inferential thinking.
Knowledge Is Power Or…Even Freedom
I ask again, Have people forgotten the wisdom that Frederick Douglass learned to gain his freedom? Do people not know the axiom: “the man who knows how to read and chooses not to has no advantage over being illiterate”? Or are people just too busy being entertained rather than pursuing continuing personal education? For those who have not read the book “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”, written by Frederick Douglass, the following excerpts tell the story of how he learned that reading would free him from bondage.
Very soon after I went to live with Mr. and Mrs. Auld, she very kindly commenced to teach me the A, B, C’s. After I had learned this, she assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters. Just at this point of my progress, Mr. Auld found out what was going on, and at once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among other things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read… “There would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it would make him discontented and unhappy.”
…Whilst I was saddened by the thought of losing the aid of my kind mistress, I was gladdened by the invaluable instruction which, by the merest accident, I had gained from my master. Though conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher, I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read… What he most dreaded, that I most desired…That which to him was a great evil, to be carefully shunned, was to me a great good, to be diligently sought; and the argument which he so warmly urged, against my learning to read, only served to inspire me with a desire and determination to learn.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/09/21/who-doesnt-read-books-in-america/
https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179.pdf
https://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2019179
http://www.csun.edu/science/health/docs/tv&health.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N56WtlHf0EA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23GzpbNUyI4
https://youtu.be/Twc6T19tap4
Dalio, R. (2017). Principles: life and work. Simon and Schuster.
https://deadline.com/2021/08/rachel-maddow-msnbc-beat-oan-lawsuit-appeal-robert-herring-1234816713/
Herring Networks v. Maddow (https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/MSNBC-OAN-appeals-opinion-aug-17-2021.pdf)
Postman, N. (2010). Amusing ourselves to death. Penguin.
Douglass, F. (1995). Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave. Dover Publications.
