Hungering for books

The end of the world is just around the corner. I know this because Harper's Magazine has a feature this month on "Grand Theft Education: Literacy in the Age of Video Games" and it actually doesn't seem to see a problem. According to the article, three fifths of teenagers play video games every week and fully 25% play six hours or more. The purport of the article is to discover ways that this activity can be tapped to teach...wait for it...writing and reading. They discuss how relatively easy it would be to teach grammar, spelling, punctuation, argument, and plot. They only balk when they reach "characterization" which they grudgingly concede could not be handled very well by computer. One of the panelists says, "Honestly, I doubt that video games are capable of dealing with psychological depth at all." To which another, and a teacher at that, responds, "One of my former students told me recently that her favorite books as a child were the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. And the reason she gave me was that the lives of the Wilder's characters were completely different from her own, and yet she felt like she could be there and be them. This is the same thing when we're in the mind of Jane Eyre, or Isabel Archer, or whoever. To replicate that in a video game would be very difficult." [italics mine] The implication was that it was a unfortunate pity.

But think about that. What is being lost when students can no longer expand upon their own experiences by living vicariously through literature? What is happening when young people are cut off from the power that words, and therefore thought, can give them? Richard Wright knew as soon as he finished his first book, after having had literacy denied to him for most of his young life:
"What strange world was this? I concluded the book with the conviction that I had somehow overlooked something terribly important in life. I had once tried to write, had once reveled in feeling, had let my crude imagination roam, but the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing. It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different....Reading grew into a passion. My first serious novel was Sinclair Lewis's Main Street. It made me see my boss, Mr. Gerald, and identify him as an American type....I felt I now knew him, that I could feel the very limits of his narrow life. And this had happened because I had read a novel about a mythical man called George F. Babbitt."

Where will students today get that kind of understanding of their enemies...or their friends? And what will it mean when our world is run by people who grew up in the me-centered "virtual revolution," where the world mirrors back what they project?