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By Root 1127 0

from the curriculum in favor of handbooks of information. “But children want to know how things work,” she was told. “They aren’t really satisfied by escape books.” Similarly when I asked why my fourteen-year-old son and his classmates were learning a great deal about the natural resources of Latin America but nothing about ancient history or Greek literature, I was told that Latin America is “closer to them” than Homer. I venture to doubt both these explanations. The books I read in my childhood were, with the important exception of The Book of Knowledge (and even that had much art and literature in it), almost all works of the imagination, from Grimm’s Fairy Tales to the Rover Boys. Today the informative genre is dominant. A recent very successful series, for example, is called “First Books” and presents a fact-crammed First Book on practically everything: ballet and bees, chess and electricity, puppets and presidents, space travel and snakes, trains, trees, trucks—even, God save us, a First Book of Negroes. There are three or four extremely popular series of biographies of famous Americans—and also of less famous ones, since the demand seems inexhaustible and there is a limit to rewrites on Ben Franklin of Old Philadelphia. In one recent year, three different firms published children’s biographies of a minor Indian chief named Cohees, doubtless on the theory that being (a) real and (b) American, Chief Cohees is “closer” to our children than Achilles or King Arthur.

Speaking on “Mass Information or Mass Entertainment,” Dr. George Gallup, a high priest of research, expressed a point of view common among serious-minded, public-spirited Americans:

One of the real threats to America’s first place in the world is a citizenery which daily elects to be entertained and not informed...The present lack of interest in the information-type show is shocking. The total number of hours devoted to just two shows, I Love Lucy and Show of Shows, is greater than the hours spent on all information or educational shows put together...In the entire history of radio, not one serious educational show has ever reached top rating, and most programs of this type have such small audiences that they are kept on the air solely for prestige...[3]

The newspaper itself has had to make concessions. Within the last two decades, the number of comic strips printed daily and Sunday has increased by many times, and...more adults read the most popular comics on a given day than read the most important news story on the first page...In a recent study of metropolitan newspapers, it was found that the average reader spends less than four minutes a day on the important news. He spends ten times as much on sports, local gossips, and the service and entertainment features.

Although we have the highest level of formal education in the world, fewer people buy and read books in this nation than in any other modern democracy. The typical Englishman with far less education reads nearly three times as many books; if he leaves school at fourteen, he reads as many books per year as our college graduates.

Public-spirited, serious-minded—yes—this indictment, delivered at a peculiarly American Ritual of The Fact: the ceremonies at the University of Iowa several years ago, incident to the burying of a “time capsule,” a big metal container packed with typical books, newspapers, and other artifacts of our culture, so that future archaeologists will have no trouble assembling The Facts about American twentieth-century civilization. But there are subtleties to the question of Information and Entertainment that are perhaps not dreamed of in the Gallup Poll. That almost all the Entertainment on radio and TV is of poor quality is true, but is the Information much better? Are the dynamic “news commentators” superior to the hopped-up comedians? Are the interviews with senators, the panel discussions that worry some vast problem for twenty-five minutes, the once-over-lightly travelogues-cum-statistics on The Communist Problem in Asia—are these really more “serious” and “cultural”