At church on Sunday, the lay preacher who was giving a sermon on a passage from the book of Malachi, mentioned in passing that it was likely that a lot of people hadn't read this before and he proceeded to give an exposition of where this fits in time.
There's several things going on here:
- In a lot of cases if you are giving a lecture, it is in fact wise to assume that the audience knows nothing. You are the lecturer; who has been placed in that position and given that role precisely because you know more than the audience. It is your job to impart knowledge and wisdom to your audience.
- It is also wise to assume that people haven't read the book. Especially if you are an English teacher and are teaching a literature class, you can absolutely guarantee that people will not have read the book and will be cramming Cliff's Notes at the end.
- People generally don't read books anyway...
Research companies like Pew Research, generally report that at about 2010, the number of people who hadn't read a book in the past twelve months was about 16%. At the end of the decade, that number is out to about 27% and I suspect that that number is growing and will eventually top out at some point.
Also, the number of books that people think that everyone else is reading is 12 but in actual fact, is actually close to 4. For the record, I logged into my library account and found that I had checked out 22 items in twelve months. 20 of which were books.
I had suspected for a while that a lot of damage to people's reading habits is done in high school, where English teachers set texts which were archaic but looking through the current set list for HSC English for 2019-2023, I find a wildly diverse set of novels, plays, poetry, film, and even non-fiction texts, which indicate to me that educators have long realised this problem and are desperately trying to correct it¹.
The thing is that practically everyone, down to about 5 years old I presume, now interacts with the world through smartphones and tablets as though this was utterly commonplace and not some marvel of the twenty first century. It is insane to me that the iPhone came out in 2007; which means that there are kids in high school who are older than it. The world we live in, at least in westernised modern society, is awash with literacy; which means that the declining rates of reading books for both fun and work, is not a literacy problem.
It takes both time and effort to read. I will confess that I have loads of time as I travel forth and back across Sydney; so I tend not to have a problem here. However, if you are at home and you have a smartphone and a television, then your ability to consume media which is visual is far greater than at any point in history. I have no doubt that the rise of very long form drama series such as Game Of Thrones (which was based on a book series began in 1996), Scandinavian crime drama, or the current next best thing Star Wars: The Mandalorian, work well because people are still prepared to take in very complex stories but not necessarily do the work that reading demands.
This actually leads me to a strange question. Has people's story consumption habits actually dramatically changes, or is it just a media shift? News media shifted from print, to radio, to television, to the web, and now sort of sits in a confused mish-mash of all of them. People's consumption of stories, is more or less identical.
I myself have been watching a series of lectures from CS Lewis, which were originally broadcast on the BBC Home Service during the Second World War while German bombers were delivering packages of destruction by air. They were adapted into books, and have now been reread and turned into a series of 'doodles' on YouTube. Can I claim to have read the books? I do not think so but then again, in 1940 they were on the radio in the first place.
I do not think that people's lack of reading is by any means a new phenomenon. While I assume that literacy rates in the first century were far lower than now² I still think that first century Jewish people had higher literacy rates than the rest of the Roman Empire. Nevertheless, the apostle Paul wrote to his apprentice Timothy:
Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to preaching and to teaching.
- First Letter to Timothy (1:13).
Now while I don't expect you to take away some kind of religious message here, it does illustrate that people's lack of reading, whether it was caused by illiteracy or in the modem context apathy, has always been a thing. Furthermore I would point out that as the internet itself moved from a purely text based thing to being a multimedia panoplexornucopia the rates of people publishing blogs has fallen through the floor.
I think that if you are giving a lecture that you have to assume that the audience didn't read the text. If you are preaching, the best option is to have someone read the text at the top of the service, precisely because you know that the audience hasn't read the text; even if you ask really nicely beforehand.
If you are someone who is giving a lecture or preaching, you are the Cliff's Notes. It should almost always be axiomatic that you know more than the audience because at bare minimum, you will have been the only one in the room who has read the book.
¹As opposed to days of yore when English teachers were trying to punish students as some kind of retribution for the horrible texts that they had to read.
²I think that the greatest contributions to modern society are sewerage and water systems, mass literacy, and refrigeration.
No comments:
Post a Comment