There is a new buzzword reemerging in reading circles—“aliteracy,” which means being able to read but rarely choosing to read.
The backstory on aliteracy is the rise of the screen age. We’ve all read about the trends: Kids are spending too much time sort of reading (but not anything remotely profound), kind of writing (but not anything resembling a sentence with proper grammar), kind of focusing (until they hop to the next screen). All of this adds up to children who can read but don’t have the ability to comprehend a real story or grasp a complex idea, and no capacity to move from the written word to meaningful knowledge.
The use of the term aliteracy has ticked up recently, though the term and its definition can be found as early as 1966, with more widespread use beginning in the 1990s. Like the familiar “reluctant readers” diagnosis often given to children today, aliteracy is really just a form of self-determined illiteracy, aided and abetted by the time-suck of iPads, Androids, and all their techno-offspring. Many people doubt the claims of screen-time addiction, saying there is limited scientific support backing up the long-term effects of interacting with a screen. They read newspaper articles about the damaging effects of the video game culture—especially violent video games—and assume it is just one more thing to make parents nervous and anxious. Most of these kids will likely have normal lives and hold down jobs. They will grow up and get serious. Maybe so. But what about their imaginations and their passions?
Techno-enthusiasts claim that our new technologies have created new worlds for the imagination and given fuel to new passions. And surely it is true that the digital world offers plenty of facts, information, stories, and opportunities for education—and that it can spark interest in new things. Kids can learn coding and animation and 3D printing. But parents also know that more often than not our younger children go to the least nourishing corners of the online world and learn to be satisfied there, never awakening further.
In a 1953 essay on writing literature for children, C.S. Lewis recalled a woman who sent him a story she had written about a fairy who gave a child a gadget. “It was a machine, a thing of taps and handles and buttons you could press. You could press one and get an ice cream, another and get a live puppy, and so forth,” Lewis wrote. “I had to tell the author honestly that I didn’t much care for that sort of thing. She replied, ‘No more do I, it bores me to distraction. But it is what the modern child wants.’”
Not so, said Lewis. “Young things ought to want to grow.” Interest and passion offer the perfect chance for growth.
Whether or not you believe long hours of screen time are bad for adolescent development, at the heart of this debate is a more profound question every parent should ask: How do I help my child generate interests that are worthy of the human spirit at its highest, interests that help the young discover who they should become as they move through life’s stages, interests that give their lives purpose?
Every child has an interest in something, something that acts like a gravitational pull, luring them to learn more about it. That interest is often sparked in the absence of other (handheld) distractions, in a face-to-face confrontation with something that makes them pause: the real-life meeting of a giraffe, a walk on a decommissioned submarine, a stroll on the beach picking up sea life, a book about great presidents, or an aunt or uncle offering an introduction to a hobby. Books offer us entire palettes of interests without the intrusion of advertisements or the interruptions of text messages from friends.
It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I read the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom. It wasn’t until I read his moving passages on the meaning of illiteracy that I understood the need for rapacious reading among the free. For Douglass, freedom was found in the pages of books blacks could not read.
Douglass would covertly learn to read at the age of 13—by trading bread (he called it his “tuition fee”) to white children in the streets in exchange for reading lessons. In doing so, he eventually acquired the words to counter the arguments that sustained slavery. “Every increase of knowledge, especially respecting the free states, added something to the almost intolerable burden of the thought—I am SLAVE FOR LIFE,” Douglass wrote.
Children in America today come to their literacy without the dark overtones of terror and fear that Douglass experienced. They read freely for education and adventure, they read for joy and laughter at their leisure, they read to feed curiosity and fuel passion. This is a gift that can be put into a child’s hands, though admittedly it is sometimes harder than simply putting an iPhone into their hands.
If our children are slaves to handheld devices and screens, we can certainly try to blame the evolution of technology, social and cultural trends, and even economic gains and economic regressions (a Kindle Fire is cheaper than a babysitter over the long-term and playing Candy Crush a lot easier than tackling a new idea). In the end, however, it is parents who will be to blame for making their children aliterate at so young an age.
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