THE FOLLY OF 'READING TOO MUCH'
By Allan R. Andrews

WASHINGTON - I read some good-intended advice this week from a psychologist, but in the end I have to say the advice-giver was dead wrong in his conclusion.
The advice was given to an adult man who had expressed the sentiment that he didn't wish to be like his father.
When he was asked to explain, he said, "My Dad was too busy; and when he was home he was remote."
The psychologist, as psychologists are wont, asked some probing questions: "When did you come to this conclusion; that your Dad was remote?"
"Just recently," the young man admitted.
"Your father's remoteness didn't bother you when you were young?" the psychologist continued.
"No, I guess it didn't."
"So what's the problem?" the psychologist asked.
They agreed the man's father had been a good provider, a good husband, a model of masculinity, and a good neighbor and worker.
"He was all those things," the man concluded, but then asked, "So how did I come to the conclusion that he wasn't a good father?"
So far, so good. I think you can see where the psychologist was heading.
I should tell you this psychologist is not one of your ordinary shrinks; he's one of those professionals who consistently berates his own profession for its psychobabble and its specialized jargon that serves merely to describe problems rather than solve them.
He's also a very conservative thinker who basically believes that grandma and grandpa knew a lot more than they're given credit for and had a great deal more wisdom about child-rearing than the majority of modern developmental psychologists. A refreshing perspective as long as it doesn't carry any political baggage.
As I said, so far so good.
However, his answer to the young man's final question about how he came to the conclusion his father was a bad father was not only dead wrong but planted the seed for even worse conclusions.
"I'll just bet," the psychologist told the young man, "you've been reading too much."
Aaargh! That's like telling someone he's been thinking too much or that he needs to shut down his consciousness while he's awake.
I don't buy this argument. In fact I vehemently oppose it. The late poet Joseph Brodsky said, "There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them . . . is not reading them."
The problem the young man has in his interpretation of his father's remoteness is not attributable from "reading too much." It may be, however, that no one ever taught him or encouraged him to read critically.
About the same time I read of this psychologist's advice, I read a story about a nearby college that runs a remedial reading course for many of the top high school graduates that come to the academy of higher education.
One of the professors noted that many of these incoming students are "shocked" when they're advised they must take a remedial reading course.
"They think they can read," the professor noted. "And they can. What bedevils them is interpreting what they read. They'll often miss nuance, humor or sarcasm."
A story in the Washington Post notes that public colleges in the state of Maryland spent $17.6 million on remedial reading instruction in 1995 and that educators in Virginia estimate they spend close to $40 million on such courses. In 1997, the story noted, 17 percent of the students moving from high school to college in Maryland required remedial reading courses.
Armed with those statistics and my conviction that too few in our culture are truly taught to read critically (especially to read newspapers critically, but that's another topic), it struck me that the young man who thought his father remote wasn't suffering from "reading too much" but rather from not reading critically enough.
The young man, I fear, was too quick to devour the untested theories he'd absorbed in his reading on family life and human development.
We hear much these days about how people are not reading enough. As problematic as that may be, it barely scratches the shell of the hard-core problem. We are not becoming a nation of illiterates, but we may be on our way to becoming a nation of a-literates; that is, people who know how to read but don't.
Worse still may be our pseudo-literacy; that is, our penchant for reading without bringing our critical faculties to bear on what we read.
I'm not an adoring admirer of H.L. Mencken - who also had some biases about what should and should not be read -- but I share his attitude toward the training of an editorial writer, which could be applied to the training of readers. Among other things Mencken advised, "don't let him swallow the propaganda that is all over the place."

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