Steven Pinker, Jezebel, Cathleen Schine and Others on the Value of Reading

In response to my recent posts on the value of reading (and teaching literature), I’ve been sent some terrific links that shed light on the topic.

BikeLizard over at my OpenSalon version of this blog mentioned a Jezebel article called “Page Rage: When Books Make Kids Hate Reading.” In it, the author grapples with the problem of kids not having enough choice about what they read in school.  (The article only briefly references what seems to me to be the crux of this issue: if kids read something outside of what they are assigned in school – that is, if schools were not entirely responsible for most kids’ experience of reading – this problem would be much less dire.)

The Jezebel article in turn referrred me to this essay by Cathleen Schine (author of the novel The Three Weissmanns of Westport, which is #1 on my “To Read” list right now.)  Schine’s essay does not support the Jezebel blogger’s point, in fact – it suggests, in a slightly tongue-in-cheek way, that being “turned off” literature in her adolescence planted the seeds for her adult re-discovery of reading and made it far more sublime.

Another friend made reference to some of Steven Pinker’s discussions of violence, including his assertion that the reading of literature leads us to develop a greater capacity for empathy, and that literate societies tend to be less violent than illiterate ones.  Pinker makes brief reference to this theory in his TED talk on the myth of violence, but I suspect that there is a more detailed discussion of it in either The Blank Slate or The Stuff of Thought – can anyone point me in the right direction?

Image by Horton Group