Who Wrote Handel's Messiah?

This question was posed by Jay Leno in one of those person-on-the-street interview segments he does for his late night show ("Jay-Walking"). The man to whom he posed the question did not know the answer. There were also people unable to name the countries in which are located the Great Wall of China and the Panama Canal - and yes, the questions were framed exactly that way.

Especially disturbing, though, was the way the fellow answered the question about Handel's great masterpiece: "I don't read books." He simultaneously revealed that he did not know who Handel was; was unfamiliar with this magnificent composition; did not know it was a piece of music and not a book; and that he was not a reader. Blinding ignorance, as Ann Coulter (my favorite ultra-right-wing shrew) would say, on so many levels (as my daughters would say).

It seems more and more of us are not readers. The College Board recently reported that the average score on the reading portion of the SAT was 497 (out of a possible 800), an all-time low.

[I am assuming they are comparing it not only with the "reading" scores of recent years but the "verbal" scores that preceded the revision of the SAT from two sections (verbal and math) with top scores of 800 each to three sections (math, reading, and writing) with top scores of 800 each.]

An all-time low! To call this disheartening would truly be to formulate a legitimate contender for this year's British Understatement.

Mark Twain said, "The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them." I'm guessing the man who never "read" Handel's Messiah has never read anything by Mark Twain, either.

In recent months there have been stories in the news about book sales and about how sales of books in electronic format surpassed sales first of hardcover books and then of paperbacks (according to Amazon). I found myself just a bit sad about this trend, as I strongly prefer hardbound books over paperbacks and actual books over virtual books, and I cannot help wondering, as I look toward the library that constantly beckons to me when I sit here in the family room at my computer, whether homes of the future will have libraries - or whether there will be public libraries or university libraries. I won't live long enough, I think, to see them disappear.

But if people are buying more virtual books than actual books, at least they are reading, aren't they? (I try always to look on the bright side.) And then the College Board tells me no, they aren't. Now, I realize the fact that young people are doing worse than ever on the reading portion of the SAT does not necessarily mean they are not reading. But I'm pretty sure it means exactly that. I have a good idea what one must do to score well on that portion of the SAT, and people who read a lot generally do quite well on it, and the more they read the better they do. Not a perfect correlation, of course, but I bet it's good.

When my daughters were in elementary school their teachers asked the students to report on how many books were in the home. I suppose many students were able to count them. At my house, it turned into an interesting exercise in mathematics, as the girls would count the books on a given shelf that seemed to have books of average size, and then multiply by the number of like shelves. This was repeated for one book case or wall of similar shelves after another, until they had worked their way through each room with book cases or shelves on the walls, and then they were ready to add them all up. They were instructed to report that the number was an estimate and how they had arrived at that estimate.

So I realize my views on reading, its importance, and its place in our culture may be a little atypical. But when I read about how many students our system of public education is graduating from high school functionally illiterate, I suspect the chasm between my views and those of society at large must shrink considerably if we are to produce future generations of high school graduates adequately prepared for college - or for any jobs but those requiring only "unskilled labor." And how many "unskilled labor" jobs are left today? Surely by a generation from now there will be far fewer.

So we must get our kids to read more. And it wouldn't hurt them to listen to Handel while they are reading. Maybe not The Messiah, which is quite demanding of one's attention. Maybe some pleasant concerti grossi, not too loud....