The Jewish website Mosaic carried Adam Eilath’s interesting article “Jews Must Resist Becoming a People of the Screen.” The author reflects on traditional Jewish religious education. It’s not by accident that Jews (and later Christians) were called “people of the Book,” because of the centrality of Scripture to their faith. Speaking of his observations at a Jewish school in Tunisia, Eilath observed, “There, I encountered a vision of Jewish learning that felt at once ancient and startingly alive: late in the day, students leaned over well-worn books, murmuring verses in rhythmic cadence, repeating phrases until they settled into memory. When I asked what they were doing, several boys answered instinctively: ani m’shanen, ‘I am reviewing, repeating, memorizing….’” (A link to Eilath’s article is here.)

Recent graduates of the Columbia School of Education would no doubt tsk-tsk such “teaching” and “learning,” but there is truth in it. The Mosaic editor points out that “those schools cultivated such skills through an emphasis on intense, repetitive study of the few books that were available. Nowadays, vast, readily searchable libraries can be accessed at the stroke of a fingertip, but deep intimacy with texts is rare.”

The traditional Jewish school — probably not much different from what a boy named Jesus might have experienced in Nazareth — had limited texts, but the scrolls were drilled deep and through. A text was scrutinized, examined 90 ways to Saturday, and committed to mind and heart.

In one way, that was a special form of learning related to sacred texts. In another, however, it was how people once upon a time read.

Simon Olech makes a similar point here at Crisis. Confessing to be of the screen generation, Olech admits to doing everything to avoid reading texts in full. CliffsNotes, movie adaptations, excerpts, ChatGPT all provide the “gist” of the subject. Schools yield to this tendency by typically assigning a few chapters rather than a whole book. To the degree students still “read,” they read cursorily. Olech admits it took time for him to be converted not just to the need but the joy of reading in-depth, but laments that is not what American “education” promotes. It’s true.

I recently began listening to a series by a rabbi who is leading his listeners through the Book of Exodus. The level of detail, not just of the text but of the rabbinical commentary seeking to elucidate it, is impressive. That is reading. 

Mosaic’s editor is right when he observes we have access to so much “information” but little wisdom. Pace enemies of memorization, rote learning was not just the absorption of facts but, with their intense familiarity, normally moved the student to an understanding of their interrelationships. Consider 19^th century Americans like Abraham Lincoln in his log cabin. He probably had a Bible and maybe an almanac or some basic schoolbooks, but he no doubt “poured” over them, mastering not just their content but learning to be a “critical thinker.” I suggest that is qualitatively different from the proliferation of momentarily significant “case studies” we now throw at students to opine upon, even in college, while they suffer a dearth of the basic fund of knowledge prerequisite to probing more deeply than the momentary “feelings” about a subject.

I’ll use an illustration from this Boomer’s days. I grew up in the era when you were the lucky kid who got a tape recorder and could tape favorite songs off the radio. Most of us did not have the world’s music Spotify or some other app today might make available, but we had our favorite songs and listened to them over and over again. That meant we heard and noticed things like notes, bridges, instrumentation, etc., that endless tracks probably don’t make listeners observe. Yes, sometimes our listening was bad: for a long time, I was certain that Perry Como’s “Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Empty Arms)” was really “Just Out of Reach of My Terenthia” — a girl’s name that sounded exotic, although I’d never heard it before or since. It took a printed set of lyrics for me to say, “Oops!” But, again, there is a value in deep reading and listening.

I’ve regularly saluted Mark Bauerlein’s observation that the advent of screens in schools has brought us “the dumbest generation” that, after almost 20 years, is now “the dumbest generation grows up.” It’s been a great gig for Apple, less so for our kids. Screens don’t encourage deep reading. Aristotle and Aquinas could not have put their thoughts into tweets.