A highly paid international software troubleshooter from Silicon Valley was a Thanksgiving visitor in my home. He was able to fix several long-festering problems on my computer very quickly. His technical confidence was impressive.
The only thing that didn’t fit the profile was that he was reading Ernest Hemingway’s autobiographical A Moveable Feast about his early years in 1920s Paris as a struggling writer. Asked why, he explained the value of self-discovered reading, unassigned by any teacher or professor.
Required reading is apparently at an all-time low in American education, he said, especially that which gets students to extend their vocabularies into unfamiliar worlds of ideas. After all, the comfortable, unchallenged student is more likely to be retained. Once the cornerstones of education, both writing and reading have given way to other forms of learning.
“Hunger is good discipline,” he quotes Hemingway, who also confided that “I thought that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be” and “If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.”
In short, people of all ages, not just youngsters, now have a new opportunity to read freely and without coercion, choosing to enlighten themselves without some authority figure telling them how to interpret what’s being said. The literary world has been well-stocked over the centuries with diverse thinking that puts to shame the shallowness of our media-based offerings.
