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Part of the difficulty is that many of today's students chafe at the difficult vocabulary, the long sentences and paragraphs, and the complex language of other centuries. Because they are used to being passively entertained, people rarely want to read anything over 200 pages. English teachers and librarians seem to feel that things are so desperate, it's better to get students reading anything, rather than nothing. So they cater to this intellectual sloth, thus contributing to the dilemma.

Two of the results to this approach are "outcome-based education" and libraries of paperbacks that Mrs. Leonard would have thrown out by the box full. Thus our young people's intellectual growth is stunted, while the intellectual vigor of our nation at large continues to spiral downward. Has any other generation been more intellectually indulged and pampered?There is yet another dimension to this issue. Most of us are horrified at the increase of violence perpetrated by youth. We endlessly discuss the effects of television, videos, music, and movies. What about their reading material? Are they reading? If so, what are they reading?I teach evening parenting classes in a public grade school. Recently I saw a book on display in the school library that was based on the television show, "The Addams Family." The main character of the book was "Thing," the disembodied hand. There was no plot, theme, or character development to speak of. The sole point of the book was to advertise the television show. The library also had an entire shelf of "Goosebumps" books, similarly devoid of meaning and value. In another classroom, an English class was studying a shallow book about an out-of-control "space alien child" who terrorizes friends and family. What are such books doing in our public schools and libraries? It's one thing for publishers to print this sort of thing, and another matter entirely for libraries and schools to carry and teach them. Instead of promoting the best that our civilization has to offer (as schools and libraries used to do), our children are being encased in pop culture everywhere they turn. This creates a self-perpetuating cycle, and is a disservice to our young people.

Children are more impressionable than adults. What they read, see, and hear goes inside and becomes part of their inner world. They don't have the intellectual filters that adults do. When my daughter was little, we talked about good literature, and how much popular writing is mind pollution (an idea that caught her imagination and had the desired effect). If our children are reading about monsters and aliens, these are the images they are internalizing. Is it any wonder that some of them begin to act like monsters and aliens?Timeless, beautiful literature has the opposite effect. When we read literature peopled with characters who struggle with life's difficulties and overcome themselves and their circumstances, this presents us with a powerful blueprint, and most importantly, with hope. We feel that we too can overcome our own inner difficulties, struggle with our life circumstances, and thus find meaning and fulfillment. Such literature lifts us up to what is good and hopeful in our common human heritage. Therein we find beauty, which the human heart ever seeks. As Dostoevsky said, "Beauty will save the world."

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February (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44