Still on the topic, raised in an earlier post, on the value of reading.
I've run across two insightful pieces about reading. One study suggests that for every book a typical collegian has read, he or she has viewed 100 films.
No wonder Johnny can’t write.
Then comes college professor Susan Wise Bauer, who cautions in a Mars Hill Audio Journal tape, a kind of audio magazine, against trying to read too many books too fast... .
Her point was not to read for information but to understand what the work says about the human condition.
“I mean, you can gather information quickly," she told interviewer Ken Myers, “but you cannot understand quickly."
Good reminder.
Somehow, one suspects the 100-1 tape-book ratio doesn’t stem from collegians carefully working their way through the classics.
Having said all this, we’ve hired maybe 10 Penn State journalism graduates in the past five years, and they’re an impressive bunch with capable language skills.
Thanks, Jim, for your good comments, and your obvious concern about the state of our reading and writing. As a local indie bookseller, I, too, have great interests in these trends, and their public consequences. (Shades of "Amusing Ourselves to Death" eh?) We appreciate your raising this quesiton, alhtough I do think that the increased level of thoughtful media literacy is a good thing.
Speaking of film, did anyone see the piece in USA Today (sorry) yesterday by Calvin College professor William D. Romaonowski, about religion and film. Very intersting, making the case that films that explore the human condition (a la Bauer's piece you mentioned) can help create public discourse--the way Hotel R can about international justice, say, or Crash about race.