BORN INTO THE MAGIC REALM

My father was Joseph Roy Flynn, born in 1885,one of seven children who survived to maturity.Like most Irish-American families of the day,he and his four brothers all went into factory work betweenthe ages of eleven and fourteen, so none of them got ahigh-school education. My grandfather was too proud toput his daughters into Anglo-Saxon homes as servants, soAunt Marie and Aunt Lucy did finish high school.

My father's first job was in the Rumsey-SycamoreBed Spring Factory. In 1900, when he was fifteen, the bossput up a sign that said, "If this county goes for WilliamJennings Bryan [the more liberal candidate for President],there will be no work for two weeks." They voted for Bryanand were locked out for two weeks.

In their youth, all seven siblings worked as wanderingactors in a troupe that offered plays—The Trials of theWorking Girl, Ingomar, the Barbarian, The Hunchback ofNotre Dame—around small-town Missouri. This was about1910. However, they advanced to the professions becausein those days credentialing was absent, and you couldactually better yourself without an irrelevant college degree.

My father and two of his brothers became especiallywell-educated because, despite lack of formal education,they loved to read. My Uncle Ed read at night on a navalship in World War I. Family legend has it that he used atorch, or flashlight. These were available by 1911 but it ispossible he used a ship's lantern. As a result of his reading,he was one of six enlisted men who passed an exam to qualifyfor officer's training. Later he left the navy to becomeone of the most distinguished real estate entrepreneurs inWashington, D.C. He handled the famous Watergate Apartmentswhere the break-in occurred that eventually led tothe downfall of President Richard Nixon. He was the onlyone of the boys who did not have an alcohol problem, adisease prominent among Irish-American males (readEugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night). UncleHenry was a distinguished journalist whose life and careerwere ruined by alcoholism. Uncle Jack became a naval commanderwho drank himself to death on Guam. I do notknow whether Uncle Paul liked to read, although he didwork at the Library of Congress.

My own generation, with one exception, has beenlargely exempt, so alcoholism is not in our genes. (Maybereading is.) I suspect that since we were all college graduatesthe struggle to reach our potential was less grim.Perhaps it was just our professions because in the past themilitary and journalism were staffed by hard-drinkingmen (there were no women). Journalism was on the fringeof social respectability. The police were corrupt and didnot like reporters saying so, which meant there were risks.My father's teeth on one side of his lower jaw weredamaged when a policeman hit him with a blackjack.

My father was a drunk but not an alcoholic. He gotdrunk most evenings but was always sober the next day forwork and was never jailed for public drunkenness. He oftenwent to the police station to bail out his brothers. He wasan excellent journalist but was out of work for about sixyears during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Like somany others, he was rescued by the onset of World War II,when he entered public service as a press-relations expert.Of all the family, he loved reading the most. He becamehighly educated, with a vocabulary larger than my own.To show off, he would do The New York Times' crosswordpuzzle in ink, just to advertise that he never made mistakes.He loved reading aloud, and when I was four read me allthe novels of Charles Dickens. So I was born to reading.It simply never occurred to me not to read for pleasure.

TEENAGERS AND UNIVERSITIES

I have been a university lecturer for fifty-four years, andhave taught at the University of Otago for the last forty-four.I have enjoyed my teaching more than I can say. Butone thing has troubled me greatly. At universities in bothAmerica and New Zealand, universities such as WisconsinState, Maryland, Cornell, Canterbury and Otago, I havenoticed a trend: fewer and fewer students read great worksof literature.

This is true even of my brightest students. It was trueat Cornell, a university so élite that everyone was a brightstudent. Ask students what novelist they like the best andyou get a blank, or some reference to the author of airporttrash. And it is not just students: many of the universityprofessors who are my colleagues no longer read outsidethe professional literature. Thus, if you read great books,as my Uncle Ed did by torchlight, you will know morethan many university professors.

What has happened to young people from my timeto this time? In 2008 and 2009 I was at the Russell SageFoundation in New York City and studied test trendson vocabulary in America. The tests did not includespecialized vocabulary, but sampled the vocabulary usedin everyday life. Between 1948 and 2006, adults had madehuge gains but schoolchildren, including those in theirteens, had made very marginal gains. If we assume thatthe two age groups were similar in 1948, teenagers havefallen far behind: today fewer than nineteen percent ofthem have a non-specialized vocabulary that overlaps withthat of the top fifty percent of their parents. I refer to theiractive vocabulary, the words they can use when they initiatea conversation. Passive vocabulary refers to the words youcan understand when someone else uses them. Here thegulf between teenager and adult has grown very little, ifat all.

In sum, in 1948 teenagers could both understand anduse the vocabularies of their parents. In 2006 they couldunderstand their parents but, to a surprising degree,could not initiate a conversation using adult language.The damage is not permanent: they make up some of thegap if they go to university, and a few years after theyhave entered the world of work they make up the rest.

I have spoken of teenagers. As late as 1950, the term"teenager" did not exist. Those aged thirteen to nineteenwanted to become adults and enjoy the privileges of adults,such as lack of supervision and an income of their own.I never had money in my pocket except that given meby my parents for a specific purpose, say to do an errandor see a film. Today there is something called teenage subculture,and its members have the prerogatives of adulthoodwithout the responsibilities. They have enormouspurchasing power and, thanks to the automobile, a privacythat relieves them of close supervision. This subculture isso attractive that some young adults want to remain in itthrough their twenties and even their thirties, as parentswho wish their aging children would get a job and moveaway from home are well aware.

Teenage subculture has developed its own Englishdialect. However, I had never realized that it had becomeso insulated that its...