Although they wrote before the age of social media, Adler and Van Doren’s prescription is nevertheless helpful. It is uncontroversial that, in today’s world, the internet-and social media in particular-have further exacerbated this problem.
He has performed acceptably without having had to think. He then pushes a button and “plays back” the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all. The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements-all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics-to make it easy for him to “make up his own mind” with the minimum of difficulty and effort. are so designed as to make thinking seem unnecessary (though this is only an appearance).
The authors begin by highlighting a societal problem that is centuries old, although many think of it as a modern phenomenon: The book sets out to offer the average reader a set of high-leverage intellectual tools that can vastly enhance the depth and value of his reading, and it succeeds its flaws are minor in comparison to its achievements. The latter requires several skills that take a lot of practice, such as identifying bad reasoning, extrapolating from incomplete or poorly organized data, and evaluating claims in the proper context.
The print version of the book is a hefty 426 pages, all of which explore different aspects of one central idea: the difference between reading as a means of absorbing information uncritically and understanding that information. These words were first written in 1940, in the first edition of How to Read a Book. Nothing less will satisfy the needs of the world that is coming. We must become a nation of truly competent readers, recognizing all that the word “competent” implies.
We must be more than a nation of functional literates. New York: Touchstone, 1972 (revised edition)
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