Who can be affected by books?

About ten years ago, I was reading a classic sociological study written in the 1960s. The authors, respected leaders in their field, matter-of-factly stated, “the number of students who can be significantly affected by books has always been fairly small.”

At the time, I was struck by two things. One was how completely out of place such a statement would be today. People today talk a lot about how people have different abilities, and how educators should recognize and engage those abilities. But we almost never say that most students, or even some students, are constitutionally incapable of doing something, in particular when the people involved in the conversation would consider that something to be pretty basic—readers in the 1960s obviously did not count themselves among the majority of people on the planet who ostensibly cannot be affected by books.

But the other thing that struck me was that, even though we don’t talk this way anymore, we often act as if the idea were true. Whether it’s true or not that some students just cannot be affected by books, we ask them to read less and less all the time. I think it would be uncontroversial to say that opportunities to be affected by books are scarcer now than in the 1960s, when the paperback revolution was at its height. Some of my senior colleagues tell me that they still ask students to read just as much as ever. But that’s sort of beside the point. If I press them a little, they’ll admit that the students don’t read as much as they used to, no matter how much they’re asked to. And not just in class: students, like people in general, read less today for their own personal enjoyment or betterment than they did in the not-so-distant past.

It occurs to me now that in the process of allowing it to become true that the number of students who can be significantly affected by books is small we’ve managed to pretty much debunk the idea that this is some sort of permanent, natural state of affairs. Whether or not the number has “always been small,” its smaller now. That has more to do with us as society than with students and their disparate aptitudes.

Of course people have all sorts of ways to explain away declining literacy rates. According to some, it’s just the future knocking—many aspects of the status quo today, I am told, are just the wave of the future washing over us. Be that as it may, we should at least be able to agree that this future is not purely a matter of individual predispositions. Since the number of students who can be affected by books is evidently smaller than it was, we can pretty safely assume that there are plenty of students who, given the opportunity, could be affected by books, but who are just not being given that opportunity. We aren’t creating the occasions.

I was reading in a New York Times opinion piece this morning that the National Council of Teachers of English had announced in 2022 that it was going to “confront and challenge the tacit and implicit ways in which print media is valorized above the full range of literacy competencies students should master.” I’ll add this to my list of recent announcements that might have been radical or forward-thinking had it been published in the 1980s, but that now function basically to put the patina of progressivism on what is in fact already the status quo.

I’m fully committed to recognizing, valorizing, and developing the full range of literacy competencies students should master. I think I demonstrate that in my pedagogy. But the point is that one important literacy competency much more than others is imperiled today. More to the point, I suspect that the full range range of literacy competencies is systematically undermined when students are not given adequate space to engage seriously with books.

This morning, when I went to my bookshelf to pull the quote again, I observed that I had basically forgotten the second half of the sentence. The “number of students who can be significantly affected by books has always been fairly small,” the authors wrote, but then they added, “especially when the message of the book is re-enforced neither by human contact nor by daily experience.”

To some extent this sounds like a recipe for the current status quo. Reduce the number of students who can be affected by books by limiting human contact and meaningful daily experience.

On the other hand, many of my colleagues and I have found success in trying to bring reading into connection with human contact and daily experience. Valorizing the full range of literacy competencies does not need to mean undermining opportunities for students to read. In one undergraduate course I teach called “Adapt, Transcribe, Transduce, Translate” intended to introduce students to methods in Language and Culture Studies, students read extremely challenging texts on each of the four topics. But then we slow down and spend a couple of weeks not just discussing the readings, but trying to apply what we are reading to independent and group projects reliant upon the full range of literacy competencies. Students reinforce their understanding of the reading through contact with other course participants and hands-on experience.

But spaces for them to do this sort of work are scarce, and not because there are any powerful institutions out there valorizing print media above the full range of literacy competencies. They are scarce because opportunities to engage with print media are being destroyed. And we would do well to ask ourselves why they are being destroyed and who benefits. The question today is not so much who can be affected by books as who gets to be.

Eleanor Maguire died recently. You might not know her name (I didn’t), but if you’re my age or older, you will probably remember the blockbuster study she did on the brains of London cabbies. She helped to prove that parts of our brains can be strengthened like muscles. Maybe there are students who just can’t be affected by books. I still can’t do a particularly graceful cartwheel, despite my earnest efforts to train for one. But I set aside space to exercise my minimal gymnastics skills anyway, despite my demonstrable lack of aptitude. I’d advocate for a massive reinvestment in public exercise equipment, despite the fact that some people are sure to get a lot more out of it than me. I’d also advocate for spaces where people can practice their reading skills. And I can testify from personal experience that public spaces for physical exercise and public spaces for reading could both benefit from a lot more care and investment.

W.E.B. DuBois famously wrote, “We should measure the prosperity of a nation not by the number of millionaires but by the absence of poverty, the prevalence of health, the efficiency of public schools, and the number of people who can and do read worthwhile books.” The line about books might sound antiquated to some readers today. Who knows? Maybe DuBois would tell us that we can measure our prosperity by the number of people who watch edifying documentaries on Netflix. But I doubt it, and not just because of the fact that in my lived experience, the best way by far to engage with DuBois himself is to read his books, to discuss them with other human beings, and to make what we learn from them a part of our daily experience. While National Council of English Teachers fights the brave fight on behalf of the status quo, I’ll fight for a future with more books, not fewer.