The Magic of Print
Gross, Ronald
The Magic of Print This Is Reading, by Frank G. Jennings. Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University. 196 pp. $4.25. Reviewed by Ronald Gross Just how long has the printed...
...Marshall Mc-Luhan, the provocative Canadian social scientist, insists in book after book that books are obsolete...
...Reading has been coming in for quite a beating recently...
...They use a simplified vocabulary and denature its contents, and if the book is 'graded' for 'easy reading' for the 'slow learner' the felony is compounded...
...Another omission is the Augmented Roman Alphabet, a sane and apparently practical way to get beginning readers over the hump...
...He places reading in full psychological, historical, and sociological perspective...
...Jennings will have none of this, because for him reading is the finely honed, sophisticated cutting edge of a massive arsenal of symbolic skills by which we receive and interpret signs from the environment...
...Moore's experiments have dealt a body blow to the concept of "reading readiness" as interpreted by most American schools...
...Perhaps in the present dispensation," Goodman concludes, "we should be as well off if it were socially acceptable for large numbers not to read...
...On a less cosmic level, Paul Goodman has cast a cold eye on the idea that the schools' chief task is to teach reading...
...These are, however, only intermittent flaws in a fine and useful book...
...Jennings is at his best when he gets into the classroom and applies his scalpel to current textbooks...
...I was his Educational Consultant...
...he concludes that "the value of a book is in its ability to hold things still long enough for them to be understood, until fear and confusion can be replaced by something less paralyzing...
...Suddenly The Publisher grew anxious: he didn't mind being on an iceberg floating downstream in a changing educational market, but he cared not at all for the thought that the iceberg itself might be melting...
...Most textbooks are written by amateur writers (in the worst meaning of the phrase) or by literary hacks (ditto) whose knowledge of the child's mind is inadequate, obsolete, or non-existent...
...In the course of his brief book, Jennings manages to cover virtually every topic related to reading...
...This Is Reading is designed to instill or revivify the sense of magic that should surround the act of reading...
...Our sensibilities, our very ways of perceiving the world, McLuhan argues, are being reshaped, and largely to the good, by the new electronic media which transcend the rigid linear patterns of print...
...Reviewed by Ronald Gross Just how long has the printed book got}" The Publisher leaned back and touched the finger tips of one hand to the finger tips of the other...
...Jennings falters in spots, to be sure...
...Now I can...
...It belongs on the bookshelf of conscientious parents, young readers, teachers, librarians—and publishers...
...He traces the development in early childhood of language awareness and skill...
...Rather, he suggests it is mass consumption and advertising which really require that everyone read—and these messages are of dubious benefit...
...The dangers as well as the advantages of print as a medium of communication are analyzed incisively...
...He takes insufficient account of the work of Omar Moore in teaching three-year-olds to read and write through the use of electric typewriters...
...He wanted reassurance, but I could not be entirely reassuring that day in his office...
...Jennings goes on to score mercilessly the "bastardization of history," literature taught through anthologies which "tear the soul out and label the squirming parts," and social studies reduced to "the coagulation of a mess of unrentable subject matters...
...We had been discussing a new educational venture his firm was considering, and I had described the extraordinary diversity of instructional materials currently competing with the textbook: programed learning, teaching machines, do-it-yourself laboratory equipment, authentic historical materials...
...They write 'down' to the child...
...It is an eloquent, persuasive, and eminently readable case...
...With men like Frank Jennings to sing its praises with eloquence and force, the printed book will have a long life indeed...
...Frank G. Jennings, a foundation executive, an editor-at-large of the Saturday Review, and a card-carrying English teacher, has stated the contemporary case for reading...
...He argues that with movies, television, and radio, there is plenty of "communication" going on, and that it is no longer true—as it was in the Nineteenth Century—that literacy is necessary for the operation of the industrial and bureaucratic system...
...Jennings summarizes the history of reading and writing methods, arguing that the printing press was the real motive force in the Renaissance cultural revival...
Vol. 29 • June 1965 • No. 6
