`The Degree of Intelligence Brought to the Task'

It’s a pleasure to drive my second-grader to school each morning for several reasons, principally because I get a chance to watch him in action with his classmates. They’re bright, friendly kids who enjoy each other’s company. The contrast with the classrooms I witnessed in Houston is dramatic. There, the atmosphere verged on hysteria, the center stopped holding a long time ago, and each class had its requisite apprentice sociopath. Here, as they wait for Ms. Shannon to open the classroom door, many of the kids are holding books and some, like Michael, are squatting on the floor in the hallway, reading. My guess is that these qualities – intelligence, mutual respect, modest civility and a taste for books -- are related in some complicated way.

What interests me even more is what the kids are reading. My observation is informal and non-invasive: I’ve never asked what they’re reading or why they’re reading it. Thus far, I’ve noticed Poe (my son), collections of “Peanuts” and “Calvin and Hobbes” comic strips, a field guide to insects, Frindle and other books by Andrew Clements, and various “chapter books” from the pens of authors who churn out titles faster than Joyce Carol Oates. These are kids who, though born in the digital age, make room for books in their lives despite stiff electronic competition, an effort I hope signals the beginning for some of them of a lifelong devotion. Unchecked, the human default mode is laziness and near-idiocy, interrupted on occasion by mayhem, so these kids are already bucking the odds.

In 2004, Joseph Epstein published “Is Reading Really at Risk?” in response to one of those hand-wringing studies issued by the National Endowment for the Arts. The essay, by our most entertaining essayist, has been collected in It’s a Cardboard Belt! In Epstein’s estimation, the study makes a few useful points but also reports the obvious as revelatory and ignores important considerations. Namely, it treats “the quality [Epstein’s italics] of the reading being done” as though it didn’t exist and fails entirely to recognize “serious nonfiction”:

“As for the quality of reading, the survey presumably counted mysteries, science fiction, bodice-ripping romances, and sentimental poetry as literature. The literature being read, in the reckoning of the survey, is, then, fairly likely not to be of a serious nature: more Tom Clancy than Ivan Turgenev is doubtless being registered, more Maya Angelou than Marianne Moore. The thought that 96 million people in our happily philistine country are regularly reading literature, even though it might represent a decline over twenty years earlier, would still be impressive, except for the fact that we don’t know how many of them are reading, not to put too fine a point on it, crap.”

What pleases me when I see my son and his classmates standing in the hall before class is the casual sense of excitement they bring to books. Some of what they are reading, even by second-grade standards in a dumbed-down age, is “crap” – particularly books with commercial tie-ins, to movies or television shows. But their pleasure in books is unself-conscious. They’re not trying to impress anyone except perhaps their own better selves. They have not yet learned to behave like some grownup readers, of whom Epstein writes:

“People who openly declare themselves passionate readers are…usually chiefly stating their own virtue, and hence superiority, and hence, though they are unaware of it, snobbery…The assumption – and it is also the assumption behind `Reading at Risk’ – is that reading is, per se, good. But is it, immitigably and always? Surely everything depends on what is being read and the degree of intelligence brought to the task. Even so powerful a reader as Samuel Johnson claimed that his indulgent reading of romances deepened his plunge into depression.”

That distills it: “what is being read and the degree of intelligence brought to the task.” The reading of essential books, the ones that have reliably changed lives for centuries, will always remain a rare proclivity. Our “happily philistine country” is surely preferable to one in which all books but one, whether Mao’s or the Koran, are proscribed. The happiest and most suspect of human gifts is imagination. Here’s Epstein’s conclusion:

“Ours is supremely the age of abstractions. 'Create a concept,' Ortega y Gasset said, 'and reality leaves the room.' Careful reading of great imaginative writing brings reality back into the room, by reminding us how much more varied, complicated, and rich it is than any social or political concept devised by human beings can hope to capture. Read Balzac and the belief in, say, reining in corporate greed through political reform becomes a joke; read Dickens and you'll know that no social class has any monopoly on noble behavior; read Henry James and you'll find the midlife crisis and other pop psychological constructs don't even qualify as stupid; read Dreiser and you'll be aware that the pleasures of power are rarely trumped by the advertised desire to do good.

“Read any amount of serious imaginative literature with care and you will be highly skeptical of the statistical style of thinking. You will quickly grasp that, in a standard statistical report such as `Reading at Risk,’ serious reading, always a minority interest, isn’t at stake here. Nothing more is going on, really, than the crise du jour, soon to be replaced by the report on eating disorders, the harmfulness of aspirin, or the drop in high school math scores.”