Diane Ravitch, Are Hollywood And The Internet Killing Reading?, Forbes, 2/17/09
Nearly five years ago, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) issued an alarming report called “Reading at Risk,” which declared that literary reading was in dramatic decline. The NEA reported a sharp drop from 1982 to 2002 in the proportion of people who were reading any kind of literature. In 2004, the NEA reported that less than half of adults had read any single work of literature in the previous year. Dana Gioia, then the chairman of the NEA, said that the decline of literary reading was a “national crisis,” representing a “general collapse in advanced literacy.”
A few weeks ago, however, the NEA reversed its course and said that the latest figures showed a turnaround. They also revealed that for the first time since 1982 the proportion of adults who had read at least one novel, short story, poem or play in the previous year had risen.
Javier C. Hernandez, A New High School, With College Mixed In, New York Times, 3/18/09
A school that officials are billing as a kind of hybrid between a high school and a community college is set to open in Brooklyn this fall.
At the five-year secondary school, called the City Polytechnic High School of Engineering, Architecture and Technology, graduating students would receive both a high school diploma and an associate’s degree.
Chris Davies, Are social networking sites really infantilising our teenagers?, Mortarboard Blog (Guardian), 2/25/09 (Adults should be wary of criticising young people for spending time on the internet. They are taking control of their lives)
There are some strange things being said at the moment about the mind-warping dangers of young people using the internet too much, especially for social networking purposes.
Some “experts” have told us that young people are missing out on crucial benefits of physical proximity because of their enthusiasm for virtual social worlds, forgetting, perhaps, that they also spend several hours a day crammed into classrooms together. We’ve also been told that they are compromising their attention spans by spending so much time on sites such as Bebo and Facebook.These questions are entirely legitimate and deserve to be asked, but ideally not in the spirit of setting off another moral panic. It is not, after all, as if no-one has thought of them already. A considerable number of social scientists have been working in this area throughout the world for quite for some now.