“Reading has lost its privileged status,” Denby writes, so much so that “few kids are ashamed that they’re not doing it much. The notion that you should always have a book going — that notion, which all real readers share, doesn’t flourish in many kids.” Reading literature for pleasure is a declining pastime among younger people, and that has much in common with the plight of the arts in our current culture. Many people simply act as though neither activity is worth the effort. What’s most to blame is the materialism that is so characteristic of our culture.
Measurable results
While a few people clearly understand that reading literature can be a transformative experience, the problem is proving that to a society that demands measurable results. Standing in the way is “the American notion that assertions unsupported with statistics are virtually meaningless.”
How do you accumulate statistics when what literature, and the arts more broadly, give is immeasurable? How do you make a case for something profoundly spiritual in a culture that is increasingly materialistic? That’s the $64,000 question these days. (It’s OK if you have to look up that reference.)
That’s why interacting with art and literature is not within today’s idea of education, which for most people means science, technology, engineering and mathematics. No less prominent a person than the current president angered some people two years ago by remarking that the country doesn’t need a lot of people going to college and getting degrees in art history when they could be doing something practical like working in manufacturing. And then when he backtracked and apologized, one of the people currently campaigning to get his job immediately criticized him for apologizing.
“We need more degrees that lead to jobs,” Marco Rubio tweeted.
Pragmatism
So in a materialistic, practical society, why go see a play when the television is right there? Why go listen to an orchestra when you’ve got the mp3, or you can YouTube the New York Philharmonic from the couch? And who has time for a 20-minute symphony anyway? Why ought we to care about George S. Kaufman or Jackson Pollock? Why read “Moby Dick” or “Ulysses” or “Ode on a Grecian Urn”? None of that will help you get a job.
Last Sunday morning, already worried by this matter of vanishing readers, as I listened to a fine orchestra play a hymn I started wondering where tomorrow’s oboe players are going to come from.
Why on earth would a young person in so materialistic a culture as ours devote the time and effort required to master an instrument? From where will come the encouragement to press through the difficulty of mastering the oboe? (By the way, I have students whose parents instruct them not to major in history even if they love it — I can’t imagine what they’d say to the kid who wanted to be an oboe player.)
Thankfully, the wisdom of youth is not completely squelched by the shortsightedness of materialism. So we still manage to have oboe players, history majors and all those other inquisitive, gold souls who somehow manage to do something as countercultural as pick up a paintbrush, a musical instrument or, one can hope, a book.
If isn’t a computer game, many kids are not interested. Parents have allowed their children to seek gratification and entertainment from the computer. To many kids, music is not fun.