Reading is fundamental; critical reading even more so

By Jim Slusher

We published a letter a few weeks ago from someone taking issue with an editorial we had published in support of a new Illinois law that requires the teaching of media literacy, and I’ve been troubled ever since.

Not because we published a letter from someone disagreeing with us. We do that all the time. Indeed, it seems to me that most of the letters involving our opinions that we publish disagree with us. And that’s fine. Truth, whatever that is, or the best course of action in dealing with any situation emerges out of thorough discussion of all reasonable points of view. And, for the record, this writer’s main point was reasonable enough. He argued that schools should stick to the basics of reading, writing and math, and we know well that people have been arguing for a century over whether the schools should teach anything beyond the famous three R’s.

But this particular disagreement struck me because, especially as a journalist, I think the issue of knowing how to critically evaluate what we read is as fundamental as the ability to read itself.

As it relates to mass media, this has been true from the very first scratching of symbols on cave walls to tell stories about the nature of humankind. It has certainly been true from the beginning of what we now refer to as the press, whose origins were steeped as much or more in the publisher’s goals of persuading people to specific political or religious points of view as in providing details about the sunrise and sunset and the actions of government. People needed to be able to tell truth from fiction, to know who was writing to them and what that person’s primary interest might be, to know which important facts were omitted and whether those included were the most important and relevant.

And this type of thinking could not be more important nor more difficult than in our time. Today’s media landscape features more sources than ever, only a small portion of which strive for the ultimately impossible goal of selecting the most important stories to tell and telling them in full detail, all without a hint of bias.

And into this mix Pandora has emptied out into the world her box of Artificial Intelligence, a fitting oxymoron encompassing both the technology’s staggering potential for good and its terrifying potential for evil.

No civil society and definitely no democracy that acknowledges and protects the rights of all its citizens can survive in a world in which those citizens cannot sort through the many different messages competing for their attention and their support.

Based on that reasoning, I contend that critical reading - and by reading, here I mean digesting all manner of information, whether text, audio or video - is as important as reading itself.

I welcome readers who challenge any of our paper’s points of view or mine, including this one. But I’m growing more every day to believe that there is no more vital or more fundamental skill than that of critically evaluating information, and I am very glad we’re demanding that our schoolchildren begin developing it at an early age.

Jim Slusher is managing editor for opinion at the Daily Herald.