The following entry is the first of several parts in response to a question posted on Quora.com.
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What lessons or skills must be learned before going away to college and how can they be learned?
This great question should be asked, to and from, early on, every student, parent, and school. Maybe not at age three (although for one person I’ll be quoting in part 2 of this entry, this is exactly the age to instill certain skills), but sooner than most think. Developing the skill sets needed to do well in primary and secondary school form the base of the pedestal for the column that will become, metaphorically, the young adult. (I will leave filling in the rest of the architectural trope of what the column holds up for individual readers to fill in: each of us should have our own dream of what constitutes the most useful ‘house of being’).
Given my background in teaching, writing, philosophy, and literature it should come as no surprise that I would suggest that learning how to read deeply and think critically should be at or near the top of any list like this. The ‘what’ is the easy part of your question; it’s the ‘how’ that could and should fill a library’s worth of books. With books and reading in mind, I will structure my comments with the help of a few texts that I think might support my thesis and then lead to some paths that might help students learn how to learn.
If I need to support how the brain changes through reading I would point to Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read. I’m not advising this as pick up reading; the text is dense, but I mention it as it details, through the use of scientific research, how the brain changes through reading. If there is a moral to the book, it comes from a relatively unknown French writer who Dehaene quotes to end his book: “Reading that pleases and profits, that together delights and instructs, has all that one should desire.” ― Jacques Amyot. I think the ‘all’ could be edited out, but there’s no doubt that reading means more to intellectual growth than almost any other form of mental exercise.
But there is an important difference between slow and fast reading. I believe that both skills are necessary today. One of them, however, virtually every student in secondary school now already has the equivalent of completing PhD research. Fast reading is what most of us do. The information glut is too much. Too many emails, texts, sites catch our eye, but they catch the eye briefly. As a result, we’ve learned to read in what has come to be called the F structure. The F is not a grade (although some critics of fast reading would say it is certainly poetic justice), but the way the eye moves down a page on a screen to gather bits of words and slices of points-- a fragment of the whole.
The danger in this form of reading goes back to an old joke by Woody Allen: "I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia." But many people don’t even read books much. In a recent PEW report 41% of Americans report reading between 0-5 books in the last 12 months. Given the data as it is compiled it’s hard to know how deeply they’ve read the small number of books they say they have read.
Rather than finding the time to read sequentially through hundreds of pages, many of us dip quickly into the Internet, Twitter, Instagram etc. The amount of information that passes by makes War and Peace look like a tiny dot of text. If speeding through a single novel results in superficial responses and remarks, it comes as no surprise that our quick glances at the entire history of the world unfolding in front of us in real time leaves us with both information overload and with a biologically insufficient cognitive ability to retain information and to make reasoned conclusions. Our brains are not wired to take in huge amounts of disparate information and to store it usefully. Maybe we will evolve that way at some point, but at the moment our brains are still sifting through external stimuli in ways largely unchanged from how people took in the world around them tens of thousands of years ago. Slow reading of the type that involves attention and time, however, does change the brain. That’s what Dehane’s book set out to demonstrate. But slow reading is hard work and a skill that needs to be learned. There’s not much data to suggest that quick forays into heterogeneous inputs does much to improve our intelligence. Multiple screens and multiple sources of stimuli going on simultaneously do not help either. We have only so much mental bandwidth, and studies show that we retain much less information when we have too many things going on at once.
On the other hand, a quick tour through Google or Wikipedia provides us with some great sites we can return to for further study. We have access to information, both in reach and scope that was unimaginable even a decade ago. The issue is how often any of us takes the time to do the deep research necessary to get more than a few choice words or images to stick in our brains for any length of time. For every time we stop and get off the ongoing deluge of information we often feel we miss out on the next new thing or the most recent update. If we take a day to study something then we have missed the current buzz, something that now carries lots of social cachet. The next day billions more words and images await and it is hard to step out of the Herclitian stream since as he said long ago: it is never the same stream.
To descry this billion-bit flow as a loss of intellectual ability is, I think, to miss the point. Rather than condemn it out of hand, what all of us need to learn is how to set limits on social media, but at the same time how to use what is out there well. Learning to find useful sites for information should be an essential part of anyone’s education. This means more than being able to enter a topic on Google. Instead, it means being able to find sites that have information that is trustworthy and useful. Going to top sites in not the best way to find out information, but how many of us really go more than a page or two deep in a Google search? Learning how to use key words, learning how to bookmark great sites, going to places that have a stamp of recognition from experts in the field give a student a great advantage over most who do a search quickly, in hopes of finding information, I am not advocating students to no longer use a local library for research. There are real books and many other documents that are vital to certain projects. But there are also library systems and texts on the web that often dwarf what any single library has at hand.
I find it wrong that some schools or individual teachers ban the use of Wikipedia. Instead of banning what students will use anyway, it seems more productive to teach students to learn how to search for information that is useful whether it be for information about history, scientific research, or any otter topic that can possibly be imagined. It is no longer an exaggeration to say there are more sites and documents on many subjects than any human could go through in a lifetime. Finding out how to sift, refine, and use thus constitute part of what it means to be literate today.
In a subsequent entry, I will attempt to address the issue of how all of us need to internalize the ways learning to distinguish between systematic and rational enquiry from weakly or unsupported opinion. To put is simply, there is a huge difference between good and bad information. Learning to distinguish the two is part of what it means to be educated, today, or, let it be said, in the agora of Athens 2500 years ago. Socrates’ job description, gadfly, translates into a man who asked why all too often. He was a skeptic to all who thought they knew the truth and his dialogues are exercises in examining dearly held beliefs. More often than not, the beliefs fall flat against systematic inquiry. And the need to challenge assumptions has not changed. It is vital to any education. The difference now is that we have millions of choices and voices clamoring for attention and clicks. Most of them tend to emphasize hyperbole and unsupported generalizations rather than logically grounded approaches. But some do. The key is to find those laces and learn from them. Like so much in life, the proliferation of information can help or hurt depending on how we use the technology and tools we have. As Nietzsche put it: There are no moral phenomena, only moral interpretations of phenomena.”
Nietzsche did far more than write great aphorisms. I will end this entry with his famous words about the necessity for slow reading, the topic of my subsequent entry on what needs to be learned by students and, frankly, all of us. His words certainly speak to me:
It is not for nothing that I have been a philologist, perhaps I am a philologist still, that is to say, a teacher of slow reading: in the end I also write slowly. Nowadays it is not only my habit, it is also to my taste a malicious taste, perhaps? no longer to write anything which does not reduce to despair every sort of man who is 'in a hurry'. For philology is that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow it is a goldsmith's art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento. But for precisely this reason it is more necessary than ever today, by precisely this means does it entice and enchant us the most, in the midst of an age of 'work', that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to 'get everything done' at once, including every old or new book: this art does not so easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers . . . My patient friends, this book desires for itself only perfect readers and philologists: learn to read me well!
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