Poor Fellow My Country

The title of Xavier Herbert's lengthy Australian novel is totally appropriate for today's rant. Weighing in at a hefty 1,463 pages, Herbert's novel is one of the longest works in the English language, and certainly the most voluminous tome ever published in Australia. (Here at True Archives, we read the book about ten years ago and it almost seemed like ten years to finish it.) We bring up this literary heavywieght not only as a descriptive phrase for contemporary American culture, but also as a challenge to the youth in our country who so desperately need to excercise what little reading ability they have left.

In an April 16, 2023 article published by the New York Times, parents of children attending school throughout the United States are expressing their frustration at the fact that their kids cannot (or more likely will not) read. The demands of people showing up at school board meetings to decry this situation could possibly be the same ones that demand certain books be banned from the school library, but that is beside the point. (The irony of outlawing texts that a child cannot understand is not lost on us; surveys have shown about 1 in 3 children in the United States cannot read at a basic level of comprehension anyway.) Even more ironic are the demands of their parents to "fix" a problem of their own making.

How many of these illiterate urchins have grown up in a household where print is unknown? How many have actually seen their parents reading a newspaper, magazine, or book? How many have been read to by these parents as they graduated from the crib to the nursery? The answer is obvious. Without the example of parents reading for pleasure or information, why should anyone expect their children to value the book? Without courageous librarians who resist their Biblioposer colleagues in gutting the codex collection of countless accumulation caches, who can expect anything less than a generation of screen-addled juveniles who see no reason to read?

The problem is not the lack of reading instruction, it is the lack reading PRACTICE contributing to these dismal statistics. Don't look at the Information Scientists to come up with a solution, though. They are too busy dumping the books out of the library's back door to make room for more screens. The time is rapidly approaching when anyone who wants to read an actual book will have to visit the archive to do so.