Alain de Bouton's Bibliotherapy idea is yet
another well-meaning attempt to revive
book-reading in England. We have desperate spasms
of this sort of thing every few years. Last year
we had The Year of the Book, when a million (or
more) classics ("Wind in the Willows", "Alice in
Wonderland", etc) were given away to children
merely for the asking. Every four or five years
in the last 50, the Department of Education has
applied major additional funding to new reading
initiatives. However, reading and writing ability
is still no better than it was at around 1900.
The fact is that literacy is dying, even in the
advanced countries, among what I call the
80-class, though more books are being bought (not
necessarily read) by the 20-class. One in six of
the population can't read simple journalism
(though they can recognize the 500 or so words of
daily life that are enough to get them by). One
half of 14 year-old boys have never read a book.
One quarter of college trained state junior
school teachers can't write grammatical
sentences, nor even adequately punctuate samples given to them.
But does it matter? The most successful
house-builder in England at the present time (he
builds for the 20-class market) left school at 11
and couldn't read or write. When I was a young
man, one millionaire (i.e. when millionaires were
millionaires!) I used to know in my home town of
Coventry, who had started out with a horse and
cart collecting rags and bones from doorsteps,
was proud of not being able to read or write --
but he'd sent his daughters to the most expensive
finishing school in Switzerland.
Yes, of course it matters! We're moving into a
highly specialist age where, among the power
groups (of the 20-class) which take the main
economic decisions, precision literacy is more
important than ever, whether we're talking of
rich persons' accountants who tunnel their way
through taxation law or of scientists when they
write their research papers for peer review. The
general growth of illiteracy doesn't matter
because the 80-class is due to decline steeply
anyway once the present crop of oldies start
dying. The Top Ten elite universities which
almost exclusively feed the 20-class with their
graduates are already developing more
discriminating entrance exams to take the place
of the now discredited state-devised A-levels in
order to recruit the most talented of the
80-class before they become too dumbed down.
Keith
At 10:59 26/08/2012, Mike G wrote:
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Anjana Basu
Sent: Saturday, August 25, 2012 2:56 AM
Subject: [TriumphOfContent] Anxious? Depressed? Literate? Try Bibliotherapy
What's the Big Idea?
One of the unfortunate early casualties of a
data-driven world is anything that cant easily
be measured. The great promise of the recent
push toward the collection and analysis of big
data is scientific reproducibility. If we
collect enormous data sets on how millions of
people behave, we can more consistently produce
things they want and need. The illusion
created in part by the marketing advance guard
of the data-mining firms is that were already there.
But many valuable things remain unmeasurable,
and though we may be eager to transcend once and
for all the dark ages of human superstition,
were foolish and premature when we dismiss
intuition entirely. As generations of book
lovers will tell you, literature transforms us.
If pressed to say exactly how, most of us will
mutter something about perspective or the
experience of entering another persons
consciousness. But all would agree that our
best-loved books have in some significant way changed us for the better.
Author
<http://bigthink.com/users/alaindebotton>Alain
de Botton
(<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307379108/ref=s9_simh_gw_p14_d2_i2?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=0228QJP2S3KXV6BBZJVM&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846>Religion
for Atheists,
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679779159/ref=s9_simh_gw_p14_d2_i3?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=0228QJP2S3KXV6BBZJVM&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846>How
Proust Can Change Your Life) and his partners at
the London-based
<http://www.theschooloflife.com/>School of Life
have taken this intuition a step further. Their
<http://www.theschooloflife.com/shop/couch/bibliotherapy/>bibliotherapy
program matches individuals struggling in any
aspect of their lives with a list of books
hand-selected to help them through tough times.
You get your reading list after an initial
consultation with a bibliotherapist in which you
discuss your life, your reading history, and your problems.
[VIDEO] Alain de Botton on Bibliotherapy
No, theres no training program the three
bibliotherapists currently on staff include a
longtime small bookstore owner, an author and an
artist. And of course, theyre all avid,
lifelong readers. No theres no objective
measure of the results all the (abundant)
evidence of bibliotherapys efficacy is
anecdotal. And no, bibliotherapy is probably not
the best remedy for schizophrenia.
What it does offer is distance from and
perspective on your troubles as you view them
through the lens of other peoples lives. The
people are mostly fictional (though some
non-fiction is also prescribed) but theyre
dealing with issues just like yours and almost
certainly approaching them differently.
Inflexible thinking is characteristic of both
anxiety and depression, the two most common
psychological complaints. In their non-clinical
forms, these ailments are self-perpetuating
because the sufferer is locked into
thought-patterns that reinforce them. While
unproven, literatures rumored power to reorient
and rewire these patterns is certainly worthy of future study.
In the meantime, the shelf-help program has a
growing fan-base among Londoners who appreciate
its relatively low-cost, non-medicalized
approach to the anxieties that are
characteristic of modern life. And for those
dubious of literatures healing power, the
School of Life also offers walk-in talk therapy,
a program which also treats a certain degree of
psychological suffering as a normal, everyday occurrence.
[VIDEO] Alain de Botton on how Proust can change your life
What's the Significance?
Whats remarkable about the School of Lifes
approach is that it flies in the face of modern
Western societys expectations of expertise and
empirical evidence for the efficacy of any
service more serious than a manicure. It offers
alternative models for relieving our troubles at
a time when professional industries and drug
companies have billions invested in the notion
that they, and only they are qualified to do so.
But as Big Think blogger David Berreby
<http://bigthink.com/Mind-Matters/psychologists-assume-its-possible-to-know-a-person-what-if-theyre-wrong>recently
pointed out, psychology is one science in which
knowledge claims are particularly tough to
verify, there being so many variables involved in human thought and behavior.
Bibliotherapy is a rare and refreshing
acknowledgement, in this age of the algorithm,
that theres quite a lot we still dont
understand, and that weve got other options
besides suffering in silence while waiting for the science to catch up.
Follow Jason Gots (<https://twitter.com/#%21/jgots>@jgots) on Twitter
Image credit: <http://shutterstock.com/>Shutterstock.com
<http://bigthink.com/think-tank/anxious-depressed-literate-try-bibliotherapy>http://bigthink.com/think-tank/anxious-depressed-literate-try-bibliotherapy
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