Artificial Dumbness*

*The term Artificial Stupidity has already been claimed by Computer Science.

With my title I mean to make reference to the massive amount of illiteracy that characterizes our society today and, in particular, to make a follow up post to this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Is This the End of Reading?  In the main I thought the piece well done, quite comprehensive on the issue, making the argument that what we are observing now about the non-reading of many college students is the consequence of a long-term trend.  Covid amplified the effects of that trend but it surely didn't start them.  The article also brings in the lack of face-to-face social interaction that many students now seem to expect, the consequence being that many of them feel lonely, something the article does point out, and also not getting sufficient practice in conversation, a point not made in the article.  

When it comes to remedies, the article considers what a few concerned college instructors have been doing to counteract the situation.  While those efforts may inspire some other instructors, collectively they don't scale up well.  Further, because the piece does appear in the Chronicle, the focus is on what might be done within higher education to address the issue.  From a societal viewpoint however, that would seem too late in a student's academic career to seriously get started with literacy.  The efforts really should begin in elementary school, or even earlier.  

Next let me touch on some earlier efforts on the literacy question, some of which get to how reading is taught.  The book, Why Johnny Can't Read, was published in 1955, the year I was born.  So, it seems, the issue of broad-based literacy has been with us my entire lifetime.  I wrote about my own experience with learning to read in a post called PLAs Please, which was mainly about outside-of-school learning.   This is the most relevant paragraph for reading instruction in elementary school.

Reading was different. Pretty early on, perhaps fourth grade, we had SRA. This history by Don Parker is a fascinating read, if a little melodramatic. We also had individualized reading. (Those who preach a learner centric approach likely will be intrigued at how early this piece is and yet that its critique is not about “teacher centric” so much as it is about “grouping,” where all students read the same book.) And now I must confess that my memory fails, or that I’m not able in looking backward to attribute cause to school or elsewhere or in some combination.

The reader should be aware of my own confirmation bias.  Intuitively, I would like to replicate my experience in elementary school for current students.  But would that work?  Those who go on to become a college professor typically were quite good students themselves and may not be aware of issues that other students face who are more typical.  There are also generational effects that should be considered.  For example, we had several local public libraries within easy driving distance and my dad would take us on Saturday so we had a new book to read each week.  He bought a bunch of Time-Life books for me to read as well.  Further, I had very good teachers, I lived in a nice middle class community in Bayside, and I graduated from P.S. 203 in 1966.  Aside from playing outside, which I did with my friends, television was the main competitor for my time that might have been spent on reading.  I actually did a lot of both.  Homework, for me, was not very time consuming. 

Now let's fast forward to consider later reforms, yet well before the present time.  I wrote about this in a post called Are We Ketman? written right before I retired.  I was reading Diane Ravitch's book, The Death and Life of the American School System, after I had read a review of her book by E.D. Hirsch.  I found the history that Ravitch wrote about fascinating, since I lived through the Reagan years and was vaguely aware of the report, A Nation at Risk, which came out in 1983, but I was an assistant professor of economics then and somewhat heads down with a focus on my own research (although I did read the New York Times).  I was somewhat more aware of No Child Left Behind, which became law in 2002, as by then I was a campus Ed Tech administrator and got to know several people in the College of Education, some of whom were quite wary of NCLB.  At the time, I don't believe I had a strong opinion on the matter, but by a decade later I had become quite disappointed with the accountability movement as it impacted college-level instruction, which I wrote about in a post called, Why does memorization persist as the primary way college students prepare for exams?  This post details how illiteracy and non-learning are tied at the hip.  By enabling instruction like this, higher education is a major culprit in the larger drama.

My belief is that literacy is necessary for sense making and making sense of things is a primary reason for education.  This is true whether you regard education primarily as a passport to a good job, which I take is how the majority of the people view the purpose of education today, or if instead you regard education as a way to make good citizens, a necessity in a democratic nation, with John Dewey and his book Democracy and Education the primer, and Harry Boyte a latter day apostle.  (I saw Boyte give a talk on undergraduate education back in 2016 and wrote a long post about it then.)  But as my previous paragraph should make clear, you can talk about a noble purpose of education, on the one hand, while the actual functioning of instruction betrays that purpose.  Further, to the extent that the passport view of education holds, college faculty seem like gatekeepers and resentment can build when the education itself is non-nurturing, so the gatekeeper function appears that's all there is to it.  This is true not just for those who haven't attained a college degree, but for many newly minted graduates as well.

With all of this as background, we should then ask, who benefits from this massive amount of illiteracy?  I will answer with a few examples from my recent experience before generalizing from that.  Tuesday morning I received the following text message:

Illinois State Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) Final Notice: Enforcement Penalties Begin on May 29.  Our records show that as of today, you still have an outstanding traffic ticket. In accordance with Illinois State Administrative Code 15C-16.003, if you do not complete payment by May 28, 2025, we will take the following actions:

1. Report to the DMV violation database
2. Suspend your vehicle registration starting May 28
3. Suspend driving privileges for 30 days
4. Transfer to a toll booth and charge a 35% service fee
5. You may be prosecuted and your credit score will be affected
Pay Now:

https://idot-illinois.gov-qnfr.icu/portal

Please pay immediately before enforcement to avoid license suspension and further legal disputes.
(Reply Y and re-open this message to click the link, or copy it to your browser.)

I subsequently found this Illinois Department of Transportation page, warning about text and email scams like the one above.  Who falls for these?  Does lack of literacy correlate with falling for a scam like this?  My guess is that it does.  Also in the last couple of days, I've gotten phone calls from numbers I don't recognize in California and Arizona.  I don't pick up and they don't leave voicemail.  I'm going to assume those were scam calls as well.  Who does pick up on calls like those?  So, it seems to me that scammers benefit from massive illiteracy.

My generalization is to consider scams in the world of politics.  And it's not just Fake News!  Trump is a master of misdirection.  I contend that he has doubled down on attacking DEI because he wants to divert our attention from other things his administration is doing.  In particular, he mainly doesn't want ordinary voters to focus on economic issues (even while it is their primary concern).  The "Big, Beautiful Bill" is a prime example.  In the main it's about tax cuts for the rich.  Why should ordinary voters want that?  And why should they tolerate it when it raises the deficit and necessitates cuts in programs like Medicaid?  But if the voters have their attention elsewhere, they won't be asking these sort of questions.  I am still amazed at how many younger voters, including those who are college educated, voted for Trump because their job prospects are mediocre at best and they are challenged to find a clear path for entering the middle class.  Their economic travails are real enough.  But their lack of literacy is on display, as is their poor memory for failing to reconsider how Trump screwed up during the first year of Covid, which is probably what cost him reelection in 2020.  How could they think he'd be better to improve their own economic situation this time around?  

* * * * *

The word artificial in my title suggests that we can remedy the situation if we set our minds to it.  Is that only wishful thinking on my part or could we truly improve literacy in this country and with that improve sense making and reading between the lines as well?  I will content myself with making a few points on this question rather than detail a full program to achieve the goal.  I may do the latter in a subsequent post.

• The massive income and wealth inequality in our country has fueled the passport view of education.  Reducing the importance of the latter will require doing something of substance about the former.  A friend recently told me that I have socialist tendencies.  Indeed I do.  Many others do not.  Yet how an overwhelming majority of Americans don't share in my views completely baffles me.
  
  
•  In particular, how we fund K-12 public education now leads to de facto separate and not equal schools, as Jonathan Kozol has repeatedly reminded us.  But the lack of literacy is not just among lower income students.  So, while we try to better fund school systems, we will need other ways to improve literacy.
  
  
• I have this image in my head about when my kids were little and I would read to them at night, either with them already in bed or sitting on my lap and then getting ready for bed.  In other words, the act of reading was associated with snuggling, in this case with a parent.  Could the snuggling happen with other adults, at a school or a library or some other place that kids might congregate?  And could those adults be volunteers who help teachers or librarians, because that sort of thing, while important, probably breaks down if there are too many kids per adult so the teachers and librarians can't do it all themselves.
  
  
• I think the first book I read was The Cat in the Hat Came Back by Dr. Suess.  I read many of the Dr. Suess books as a kid and the rhyming was definitely an attraction.  (I write a lot of my own rhymes now.) When my kids were little, we read aloud Sandra Boynton - A hog and a frog cavort in the bog.  Does rhyming help kids learn to read at first?  I know there is some sensitivity that kids from different social settings might need different things to read to identify with.  But perhaps there are certain universal ways to make early readings easily understandable and that should be more of a concern.  Context will definitely become important at some point, but perhaps it is less so initially.  Is rhyming one of those universals?
  
  
• Some years ago I learned about service learning - college courses where students rendered community service and the course instructors and community service providers worked in tandem to make the entire thing functional.  At present, one might imagine those adult volunteers from a few bullets back to be registered in a service learning course.  Right now, that could happen within the College of Education, which would rule out most college students.  But what if the University as a whole embraced the idea regardless of the student's major and with the University providing transportation and other facilitating services so that the college students could spend one day a week in reading to these primary school students?  Would that become something attractive to do for the college students and in that way reinforce the good citizen approach to education.
  
  
• In addition, might such a service activity by college students encourage them to improve their own literacy by reading on their own more?  And, if it did this, could it also impact how these students go about the courses they are taking?

Let me wrap up with a note of caution.  Sometimes I can become very idealistic and hopeful, in spite of the current evidence.  Also, my experience as an Ed Tech administrator, at first in the mid 1990s when it actually was a lot of fun, then later in the mid 2000s, when we tried to scale the approach to the entire campus, which was far less enjoyable, is that early adopters can accomplish remarkable things and then make you quite hopeful.  Majority adopters, in contrast, tend to do things in a boring way and can make you cynical about things.  Being aware of this in advance, perhaps there might emerge a way for the early adopter results to maintain and spread more broadly.  I certainly hope so.