By: Sara Jameson

Sara Jameson — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 12:45:51 +0000

Interesting question of whether older adults START reading more (have more time, retired, etc) – or – whether older adults read more now because they used to read more as children.

But this is the part I worry about: Crain says “According to the Department of Education, between 1992 and 2003 the average adult’s skill in reading prose slipped one point on a five-hundred-point scale, and the proportion who were proficient—capable of such tasks as “comparing viewpoints in two editorials”—declined from fifteen per cent to thirteen.”

and this is exactly what I am about to ask my students in a university class on argumentation to do — read editorials and compare the viewpoints and respond. No wonder they have such a hard time with it.

Having grown up in a house with the New Yorker and no TV may make me not representative of my generation and certainly quite a bit unlike my West coast MUCH YOUNGER students in terms of thinking about and reading about ideas.

Thanks for your good insights on this!

By: Anne-Marie Deitering

Anne-Marie Deitering — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 11:59:32 +0000

Linear, progressive views of history still seem very pervasive, perhaps especially in narratives about how bad things are now. The implication is that people are somehow regressing, risking the loss of “progress,” never mind that that progress is supposed to have been inevitable or “already written” somehow. In the end, this way of seeing history ends up being fairly conservative regardless of its “progressiveness.”

Comments on: reading, thinking & Caleb Crain

By: Sara Jameson

By: Anne-Marie Deitering