Literacy

An interesting article in the NYT about children, literacy and the computer age.

According to Department of Education data cited in the report, just over a fifth of 17-year-olds said they read almost every day for fun in 2004, down from nearly a third in 1984. Nineteen percent of 17-year-olds said they never or hardly ever read for fun in 2004, up from 9 percent in 1984. (It was unclear whether they thought of what they did on the Internet as “reading.”)

“Whatever the benefits of newer electronic media,” Dana Gioia, the chairman of the N.E.A., wrote in the report’s introduction, “they provide no measurable substitute for the intellectual and personal development initiated and sustained by frequent reading.”

Children are clearly spending more time on the Internet. In a study of 2,032 representative 8- to 18-year-olds, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that nearly half used the Internet on a typical day in 2004, up from just under a quarter in 1999. The average time these children spent online on a typical day rose to one hour and 41 minutes in 2004, from 46 minutes in 1999.

The whole piece is worth a look, but it raises some questions that are a little uncomfortable for me as a parent. For starters, I'm someone who places a lot of value on books and who desperately hopes his daughter will love reading as much as I do when she's older. I worry about the effects that computers, cell phones and the like may have on her enthusiasm for books as she gets older. As a chronic pessimist, I'm...well...not optimistic that any of the macro trends described in this piece are going to change between now and then.

On the other hand, I recognize that I spend a tremendous amount of time on the internet; so much so that this morning, when I came over to sit next to A. on the couch, she pointed to the dining room table and ordered me to "get back to your computer, Daddy." I read fewer books than I used to, and while I read a wide range of news sources and current events blogs, I fully believe that I've become a less competent reader over the past five years as I've become more reliant on the web. My hunch is that this isn't an appropriate way to model literacy for my kid, even though I realize that by saying that, I have officially become Old Fashioned and -- in what usually amounts to the same thing -- a hypocrite.

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Literacy

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