Dave Eggers
Esquire
September 26, 2008
It's like a tic. Or a reflex. (Are tics and reflexes significantly different?) The point is, it's an automatic response, in virtually all humans, to think that things are getting worse. Medieval peasants lamented how good the Cro-Magnons had it; people in the Renaissance looked back on the Dark Ages with great fondness. This is a harmless enough reflex--lazy and uncritical, sure, but usually harmless enough.
But when it concerns how we see young people, and how we perceive the landscape of learning and literacy, this kind of doomsaying is a goddamned dangerous kind of intellectual sloth. When we assume, as most adults do, that kids are less literate, less interested in books, than ever before, it involves a willful kind of ignorance, and it imperils how we educate young people. Few if any of these dire assumptions--that no one under 18 reads, that all books will be obsolete by 2020--are borne out by any proof whatsoever.
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