It baffles me to this day. It was rush hour. I was eastbound on Hwy. 401, just entering the city limits of Toronto. All the digital signs hanging over the highway were flashing a warning. A collision had blocked two lanes of the Collectors. There was only one way to avoid getting stuck in traffic.
“Express Moving Well,” the overhead sign said.
But it didn’t matter. As many drivers as were entering the Express lanes to dodge the delay, were entering the Collectors where straight ahead of them the traffic was snarled beyond belief. Despite all the warnings, they were travelling headlong into gridlock. I couldn’t get that image out of my head of lemmings following each other blindly over the edge of the cliff. Then it hit me. It wasn’t a death wish or that they didn’t care. It was that they hadn’t bothered to read the signs. They just didn’t read!
And that’s not the only example, although it might be among the simplest. I’ve always been dumfounded by people who approach the queue at a licensing office, sometimes right next to the identification sign, and they ask, “Is this the line-up for licences?” Or, under the “Express, One-to-eight Items” sign, and query, “Is this the Express?” Now, putting aside that there’s a vision impairment problem or a language barrier – and that’s very possible, these days – I continue to wonder, “Why can’t people read?” I’m more and more certain that it’s not that they can’t, but that they won’t or don’t.
At school – and I have the evidence to prove it – no matter how often we instruct our students to read their course outlines, their textbooks, their test instructions, even emails sent directly to them, for some reason they don’t or won’t. The experts tell us it’s their short attention span. It’s their expectation that everything and anything important must be delivered to them on a platform, in an instant and with little return investment or effort. Even if I could distil “War And Peace” or the Old and New Testaments of the Bible into a tweet of 140 characters, I’m sure many adults and Millennials I know would still not make the effort to read them. One day last week, a student in one of our programs failed to read a provision attached to an assignment. Not reading it cost her a third of her marks. In protest, she insisted that she would grieve the rule she hadn’t bothered to read all the way to the school’s administration.
I’m a strong believer in: Practise what you preach. I try to read whatever is relevant in my life and my profession. So, I’ll read the papers, the messages, even the instructions – if I can – from start to finish. Yes, you won’t be surprised, that I often read those small-print, endless and boring “Terms and Conditions” whenever I download a new application on my computer or smart phone. But I’m convinced there’s a constituency out there that craves the same activity. A colleague of mine recently described a weekend getaway she enjoyed when she simply got a room somewhere off in the country and whiled away her escape time catching up on her reading.
I remember that very successful ad campaign many years ago that got people to read the advertisement that said plainly, “Don’t read this ad!” But why should we have to fool people into doing what is a simple function of the human brain? In a society where we have so much access to the written word of regulation, policy, news, advertisement, literature and art, why do so many of us refuse to exercise that freedom? When knowing is more powerful than not, why would anybody throw away that opportunity and privilege?
Back in the 1980s, when our daughters were growing up, my wife and I (and their grandparents too) made sure that their bedrooms and play areas were as cluttered by their favourite books as their favourite toys. When we spent dinners together, we talked about their favourite stories, things they’d read in class, things they’d read on the street. And almost none of their bedtimes passed without a story read to them. One of my fondest recent memories with our grandchildren happened on a night when my wife and I were babysitting. When the time came we hustled them off to brush their teeth, to jump into their pyjamas, and to get ready for a bedtime story.
“Which story do you want me to read, tonight?” I asked my grandson.
“That one,” he pointed, “But I want to read it to you.”
Melted my heart to know that reading meant that much to him. Would that more of us cared enough to read the overhead signs, the rules and regulations and our favourite stories. Would that being well-read were as much a status symbol as being wealthy or famous. But since those who need to read this, won’t bother, it’s not likely to happen.