Monday, November 10, 2008

All the News...

The sad state of newspapers is something never far from my mind. I'm a black-ink addict and value what a free and vibrant press contributes to our civic discourse and our democracy. Unfortunately, the dailies are hemoraging more red ink than they are printing black. Readership is down, advertising is down, spirits are down.

Much of this has been attributed to the dessertion of young people from the daily paper habit. They get their news on-line.

Why bring this up yet again? This mornnig I was reading Tony Wagner's excellent book, The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even the Best Schools Don't Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need -- and What We Can do About It (the sub-head is way too long, Tony). Wagner argues that while children may be learning to read, they "are not learning how to think or care about what they read." Much of this he attributes to "teaching to the test" where teachers spend far more time preparing students get ready for standardized tests then teaching them to think critically. In other words, we are creating a generation of people who don't know why what is in the newspaper is important (whether it appears on- or off-line) nor do they know how to use what they read well enough to ask tough questions or reason through complex issues.

The consequence, however, is not just that we may be losing the chance to get our fingers dirty reading each morning, but that we will lose a vital pillar of our democracy because we aren't raising students who understand what it means to be well-informed. Blogs and Facebook applications alone won't do it.

This is an unintended consequence of having the media be part of the Wall Street economy. The news outlets give the market what it wants (or try to); those that try to deliver what they think their mission mandates may kill themselves financially. This is one time that I think markets are wrong. We must have a robust press if we are to have a robust democracy.

I'll report more on this book when I finish it. In the meantime, I can only hope that serious education reform is high on the agenda of the incoming Obama administration and that anyone with thoughtful advice -- Democrats, Republicans, Independents, hell, Socialists and Communists, too -- is invited to help solve this pressing problem.

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