by Mark Sklarow, Executive Director, IECA

The typical student in the United States is awake for about 16 hours a day. School, including getting there and back, and the occasional after school activity, accounts for nearly half of those hours. The balance is meant for family, meals, volunteer commitments, part-time jobs, community sports leagues, church or synagogue, leisure reading and homework.

If that seems like a lot to squeeze into just eight waking hours a day, consider the following: adolescents are spending seven and a half of those hours connected to electronic media! This according to a new study released by the Kaiser Family Foundation. The explosion of multi-purpose cell phones (cameras, game-playing devices, Facebook interfaces), among other developments in the past decade, has dramatically increased such activities. Harry Potter and Twilight aside, these increases have come at the expense of leisure reading.

According to the Kaiser study, adolescents between the ages of eight and 18 average four and a half hours of television-watching daily and an additional two and a half hours listening to music. Of course unlike when we were teens, listening to music meant being holed up in our rooms with the stereo cranked up, today’s music listening often accompanies other activities like chores, reading, and homework.

Another two hours are dedicated to cell phones: text messaging now occupies nearly an hour and a half of each day, while talking on those phones just a half hour. Video games played either on their phone or on the computer accounts for over an hour a day, and at-home, non-school related computing another hour and a half.

Do the math: that amounts to 13 ½ hours, squeezed into less than eight hours thanks to multi-tasking that comes so easily to teenagers today. Back to that image of yourself as a teen, lying on your bed, eyes closed listening to albums through the headphones your parents made you wear rather than disturb the entire house. Today that scene—ear buds plugged into a phone, listening to music while texting friends, catching up on Facebook while finishing math homework. Don’t ask me how it’s possible…I still can’t concentrate on the reporter’s words while trying to read a chyron as it scrolls “breaking news” across the bottom of the TV screen.

I am not sure what message this really brings. I suspect I’m just the latest in 2,000 years worth of older folks worrying about how the newest generation can possibly keep up with the pace of life. But I do hope that college students (medical students in whose care I’ll someday be) are really able to learn their stuff, complete their assignments and retain everything, while connected to so many for so long in so many ways, while they meet the demands of schooling.

by Mark H. Sklarow, Executive Director, Independent Educational Consultants Association

Cushing Academy, a wonderful day and boarding school in the western suburbs of Boston, made news last month when it announced that its library would be transformed into a learning center without books. As the school’s Head has told the media, when he looks at books he sees an outdated medium, just as parchment scrolls gave way to books, he sees the evolution to electronic readers and computer screens as inevitable and welcomes the change. To be sure, replacing the library’s 20,000 paper volumes with maybe a half-million digital books can open the doors for more reading options, broader research, and provides the added benefit of promoting a sustainable campus.

As one who has believed in the importance of exposing students to as wide a range of points of view as possible, as someone who believes that students should have options of literature beyond British and American classics, and as someone who has embraced new communications models (I do blog daily, after all), I should be enthusiastic about the change. And intellectually, I embrace it. I hope I’ll have the opportunity to visit Cushing and speak to the students in a few years to learn first-hand how the change has played out. I applaud the school’s leaders for being brave enough to take this first step on an untraveled path.

Oh, but my heart has overcome my head. I love the feel and smell of books. I love the sound a book makes when you crack the binding. Despite what my mother taught me about using a bookmark, I love to turn the corner of a page, or if reading a book that someone has read before me, I love seeing where they dog-eared the page…was it the same spot as me? Did they stop just before some plot twist and fall asleep not knowing the book was about to change direction when they picked it up in the morning?

I’m old enough to remember taking a bus to the trolley to visit the regional library, where I could go through stacks of old magazines in conducting research. I may have been researching a paper on some current event and exploring its roots, but I loved looking at the ads, the other articles, getting a feel for the time period and the public mood. Could I get that from an electronic copy of the article? I doubt it.

But more than any of that, I remember biking to my neighborhood library as a kid, clutching my library card. I could arrive when the library opened on a Saturday at 8:00 a.m. and stay until hunger took over hours later. I’d wander the stacks and marvel at how many books I still hadn’t had a chance to read; grab a book I never heard of, and discover the joys of Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine or Henry Reed’s Big Show (that’s Hank to his friends). As I grew up, I transitioned to the adult stacks and discovered new authors and tore through their books. I remember discovering a biography of Ben Franklin that has led to lifelong fascination. Would I have discovered that biography by searching a digital database? I hope so, but I suspect not.

I mourn the disappearance of books, just as I mourn the disappearance of newspapers (I remember when “Nearly Everybody Reads the Bulletin.”). I’m willing to see where the Cushing experiment takes us, but how I will miss being able to sit at a table, surrounded by thousands of books on subjects I never heard of, with plots I’ve yet to experience, with authors waiting to be discovered.