Facilitate learning rather than educate. Interactive and dynamic rather than force fed. Doer and transmitter rather than receiver. I understand and believe in most of the new reevaluation of teaching and pedagogy that has occurred in the past twenty years. Students need to be actively learning rather than passively taught, and darn near every educational study has proven this relatively new ideology. However, in the world of English, there’s a problem.
Students still need to spend time, of their own accord, reading.
This problem isn’t something that’s relatively new, and I think we all have to recognize that now. As anecdotal evidence, I like to point to Frank McCourt’s memoir Teacher Man which chronicles McCourt’s time as a high school English teacher in the public schools of New York City. McCourt’s account of unmotivated students took place over thirty years ago, and in the memoir he reports widely on the lack of reading. Fast forward a few decades and the National Endowment for the Arts reported in 2007 that on average Americans between the ages of 15 to 24 spend two hours of their leisure time watching tv, and only seven minutes of that time reading. Seven. If Neil Postman’s futuristic prognostication regarding the detrimental effects of increased technological distractions isn’t vindicated by this little nugget then I don’t know what can.
Students need to be a central part of the learning process. I buy into that wholeheartedly. But how does an English class proceed to the facilitation of learning when the majority of the class hasn’t read?
Only in the last few years have I started to really understand the relationship between English as a subject that’s part of a school system (and the focus regarding a school “system” is to stress that systems are designed around ideologies) and English as a representation of the literary arts. Literature is art. This is really the crux of the issue that English teachers face in the classroom. As an art, English teachers not only facilitate interpreting that art, but also facilitate how to appreciate it, and how to apply it. The crux of the matter then revolves around the issue of technological distractions and experiencing literary art.
Music is easy, and arguably, visual arts even easier. Although one could spend a whole lifetime studying and appreciating these art forms (as many people do), to experience the totality of these genres of art can often be done in twenty minutes. Understand that I’m talking about the experience of the art, mind you, not the thinking about and interpretation of the art. A pop song is often experienced in under four minutes; many classical pieces can be experienced in under twenty. A novel, however, can take many hours to experience. How, in this way, is the novel to survive a cultural push to crowd out, condense, and clip knowledge into digestible and scan-able scraps?
Simply put? It can’t. The cultural forces that are going to cause the downfall of the novel may have unintended consequences. I’m willing to bet there’s going to be a renaissance in the interest of poetry due to these same forces. Epic, no, but short-verse freeform and the lyric? Absolutely. Shakespeare understood the requirement of readership when it came to the life of a work. In sonnet 18, the speaker depicts his lover’s immortalization in the poem itself:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st, / Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st; / So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
What Shakespeare is assuming as he penned these lines, however, is that someone will always be reading it. The poem gives the lover immortal life as long as it’s always read. Will that happen any longer if our culture only values and courts the information that’s easily accessed or instantly searched? Is the lover of the poem still given life if that famous couplet is the only part of the sonnet ever pulled out and read from the Internet’s constantly indexing search engines?
My fear is essentially this. Perennially I tell my students not to read a novel, but to experience it. Experience it as art and allow the novel to work into the inner most recesses of your brain, or, better yet, let it chip away or tug at the core of your emotions where a light of recognition and understanding connects your mind with a thought of one of your own personal experiences. My fear, then, is saying these things to a class of students who have become information spectators rather than artist actors. My fear is standing in front of the classroom and eventually realizing that my generation’s experience with a novel may be the last to experience it as such. But more importantly, my fear isn’t that the students who aren’t reading novels don’t read them because they choose the easy way out by instantly going to Spark Notes or to Google, but rather that they can’t experience it the way that I do because culture has hardwired them to see that experience as superfluous, old-fashioned, and irrelevant.
Once culture has succeeded in that, the novel will be truly dead.
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