Deep Reading for the Rest of Us

Professor of English Alan Jacobs considers the dramatic changes in American higher education over the past half century and wonders whether our expectations are realistic. Quoting a 2005 sociological study of long-form reading at the college level, Jacobs agrees with the authors’ conclusion: “[w]e are now seeing such [long-form] reading return to its former social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class.” Jacobs argues that “a permanent expansion of ‘the reading class’” may simply exceed “natural limits.” If today’s collegians are largely unappreciative and unable to read deeply, then, Jacobs believes, we must rethink the activities of the Academy.

Perhaps it isn't anyone's fault. Steven Pinker once said that "Children are wired for sound, but print is an optional accessory that must be painstakingly bolted on." The key here is "painstakingly": There can be many pains, in multiple senses of the word, for all parties involved, and it cannot be surprising that many of the recipients of the bolting aren't overly appreciative, and that even those who are appreciative don't find the procedure notably pleasant. So it's important to dissociate reading from academic life, not just because teachers and professors make reading so much more dutiful and good-for-you than it ought to be, but also because the whole environment of school is simply alien to what long-form reading has been for almost all of its history.

Rarely has education been about teaching children, adolescents, or young adults how to read lengthy and complicated texts with sustained, deep, appreciative attention—at least, not since the invention of the printing press.

In the age of information overload and mass publications, culling through the glut of textual material can seem like a pilgrimage through the slough of despond. By contrast with earlier eras of limited texts (i.e., pre-Gutenberg), Jacobs argues that today’s liberal arts education is “devoted to providing students with navigational tools—with enough knowledge to find their way through situations that they might confront later in life.”

By contrast with these current educational norms, Jacobs believes that the passion for deep reading may simply be a matter of temperament, a minority disposition at best—not a teachable skill, or at least not something that can be taught in the usual manner.

There is a kind of attentiveness proper to school, to purposeful learning of all kinds, but in general it is closer to "hyper attention" than to "deep attention." I would argue that even reading for information—reading textbooks and the like—does not require extended unbroken focus. It requires discipline but not raptness, I think: The crammer chains himself to the textbook because of time pressures, not because the book itself requires unbroken concentration. Given world enough and time, the harried student could read for a while, do something else, come back and refresh his memory, take another break ... but the reader of even the most intellectually demanding work of literary art would lose a great deal by following such tactics. No novel or play or long poem will offer its full rewards to someone who consumes it in small chunks and crumbs. The attention it demands is the deep kind.

I am not at all sure that deep attention to anything in particular can be taught in a straightforward way: It may, perhaps, only arise from within, according to some inexplicable internal necessity of being.

But, that's deeper than most of us are ready to plunge--even on a good reading day. Nevertheless, vive la différence!