David Brooks weighed in last week on the books versus Internet debate. Though I had no doubt that he would side with the print camp, I was surprised by the route he took.
He begins by citing one study showing that kids who took books home over the summer did better than those who didn’t, and another demonstrating that broadband penetration seems to correlate with decreased math and reading scores among North Carolina’s 8th graders. Fair enough.
But then he takes an odd turn, citing an unnamed philanthropist’s observation that kids most benefit from the identity that books provide them as “readers.” This identity places them at the bottom of a great hierarchy of knowledge, a subservience to which Brooks celebrates as the only path to “serious learning.” The Internet, on the other hand, encourages rampant and egalitarian “antiauthority disputation” (you can just hear the sneering). It seems that Brooks thinks students should only participate in intellectual conversation when they’ve earned the right. I disagree.
