Tuesday Voice: Our amusing age

Why this snazzy title might not be enough to pique your interest

By Kyle Garza

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas engaged in public discourse that we have today converted into a format for competitive debate in high schools throughout the United States. Even before the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the two had engaged in open-air discourse at local fairs that usually ran in a format resembling this: Douglas would deliver his speech for three hours; Lincoln would respond for a few hours; each candidate would take about an hour for cross-examination. Once, on October 16, 1854, in Peoria, Illinois, Lincoln told his audience to just go home and have dinner before he began his speech because it was already 5 p.m. The people went home, had dinner, and cordially returned for four more hours of oratory spectacle. Nowadays you’ll see this exchange on TV: “Mr. President, what are you going to do about _______________? You have two minutes to respond.” What happened in the last 160 years?
    I have some students who nearly fall asleep in the span of a 47-minute class period where we read the story of Odysseus’s encounter with Polyphemus, the Cyclops (exciting stuff if you’ve never read it).
    So am I a dull reader? Is Homer overrated? Did the season finale of Breaking Bad air on the late side last night? I can’t answer these questions. Well, I can Google the last, but my colleagues tell me the first two don’t merit a “yes.”

    You see, I teach English in a private Christian high school in Southern California. Our English curriculum derives much of its content from the Greek Trivium of learning. I’ve taught the art form of rhetoric for the last two years, and this year I am teaching a class on grammar and composition. I also help co-coach the school’s Speech and Debate Club, particularly in Individual Events and Lincoln Douglas (LD) debate. Surprisingly, I have only ever been asked by one student how the LD format was birthed. At my answer, her jaw dropped and she asked, “How could anyone pay attention to two guys just talking for that long?”
    That question disheartens me. It is indicative of a generation that has ultimately forsaken the spoken word for the texted word. It has abandoned the textbook for the tube. It has glorified the meme and shunned the monologue. Now educators like me have to teach literature and reading to a generation that hates reading more than Ryan Seacrest’s stalling for a commercial break on American Idol. Like Ichibod Crane, I have to force my students to read books and assure them “You will thank me for this someday.”

But why should we care that chitlins today aren’t piling over books like they used to? After all, you’re probably thinking what so many educational “specialists” have tried teaching me in my years pursuing a teaching credential: “Kids these days are visual learners. It’s a valid learning modality.” Whatever “valid” means to them, I think it implies an is and not an ought. Students “need” more visual stimulation today because that is their MO. The question is, “Should it be?”

    To answer this, I need to continue a little more autobiographically and historically. I am currently enrolled in an MA degree program in Apologetics. The first major text we read was Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985). Postman’s work tracks the punctuated evolution of media in America. He narrates our tale as an immigrant people who were centrally a reading community. We were, after all, the “people of the Book” since at least one Bible could be found in each home of the earliest settlers. Beyond that, the printed word was all the rage when it came to everything from entertainment to intelligence. Children helped on the family farm driving cattle with one hand and reading in the other. Life was quaint; books were plentiful; reading was common.
    Postman thinks this all ended when typography and photography emerged in America with heated force. But what was the harm? People could communicate quickly over long distances, and images could be replicated with relative ease. Henry David Thoreau saw the danger, and he remarked on it in Walden:

We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate…We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

    With the combined efforts of telegraphy and photography, the “news of the day” became irrelevant morsels of fires, elections, and town-happenings that were entire states away. People knew more, but they could do far less with that information. News no longer demanded action or concern. Information became irrelevant. The crossword puzzle was the only solution: make a game of knowing trivialities! (Have you ever pondered the double entendre of “Trivial Pursuit”?) Still further, advertising now had the power to appeal to the emotions instead of basing its argument on the credibility of the product or the supplier.

So was it any surprise that television was bound to be the next best thing for discourse in America? Postman thinks not. Television’s grasp altered our perception of news, politics, religion—even education. News anchors began transitioning between stories with “Now…this,” as if to say “The information you just heard is now completely irrelevant. Ignore it and focus on this next tidbit for 45 seconds.” Politics grew obsessed with finding candidates who had more camera appeal than political appeal (when was the last time we had a fat President? Taft?). Televangelists saw an opportunity for mass communication, but they chose to communicate through a box that was occupied 95% of the time by the secular instead of the holy. Sesame Street taught kids that learning was meant to be fun, requiring no dialogue, no questions, no time to stop and think about what was just learned.
    In short, Postman’s book explains why my students can’t pay attention to a book in class for 47 minutes, or why they can’t keep up with 10 pages of reading a night, or why they can’t understand the directions in an essay unless they are in bullet-point form, or why they grow frustrated with me when I tell them to use their imaginations when describing the sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis. Education can be entertaining, but what’s entertaining is seldom (if ever) education.
    Now we live in the generation of memes, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Tumblr, and Vine. What do they have in common? Discourse that requires less than a minute to fully digest. What follows is an ominous and tragic silence—no dialogue. Should it therefore be any surprise to me that my students grow bored when my average frame time is more than four seconds? Should I be dismayed because they tune out when I try Socratic discussion? Like Queen Victoria, my students seem to tell me every day, “We are not amused.” There is no need for a Bradburian book-burning in my class—half my class won’t read Fahrenheit 451 when I teach it.
    If you’re like my high school students, you might have just skipped down to this paragraph for the “take-away” of all this. The take-away is that you need to read what came before this paragraph. You need to learn what my students are learning: I am not here to entertain you.
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Copyright © 2013 by Kyle Garza

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