Johns applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America, and reported the following:
As it happens, the page 99 test works very well indeed for The Science of Reading. Someone who turns to that page will come across a key element of the book’s argument, voiced there by the first American scientist to write a major book about the scientific mystery at its heart. Edmund Burke Huey, writing in the early 1900s, pointed out that to try to understand what happens when we read is really tantamount to trying to understand what happens when we come to know anything at all. Moreover, he added, the act of perception that is at the heart of any act of reading is not merely passive. It involves an active seizing of meaning from the page. This “stupendous” issue, Huey said, could be investigated experimentally, and he implied that the science that would result would affect every aspect of modern life. That is what you find on page 99 of The Science of Reading. And the rest of the book is about the many ramifications of that startling claim, as they played out in American politics, media, technology, and culture from Huey’s day to the present. Starting in about 1890, it tells the story of how investigators sought to measure, trace, and diagnose reading practices, and how their findings increasingly affected the lives of all Americans. By the 1920s, children across the country were learning to read using techniques that came from this science, and in the Thirties social scientists mapped the resulting information economy for the first time in painstaking detail. The book goes on to show how in postwar America everything from corporate culture to artificial intelligence arose out of the beliefs about human reading that this science enshrined. It ranges from Dr Seuss to Thomas Kuhn, and from speed-reading scams to efforts to transform the efficiency of government. But at the same time as this science exerted so much influence, the image of the active, pattern-recognizing reader that Huey and his peers had created came under stringent attack. Critics charged that their elaborate theories distracted attention from the vital role played by the simple ability to parse words character by character – a skill, they insisted, that must lie at the very root of reading itself, and that they charged was being neglected by educators who, in trying to teach children to become readers in Huey’s sense, were failing to teaching the basic skill to millions. The result was proclaimed a “literacy crisis.” It sparked the so-called “reading wars” that continue to plague schools to this day, when a new generation of the Science of Reading based in neuroscience has become the lynchpin of a new campaign to reform once more how Americans learn.Learn more about The Science of Reading at the University of Chicago Press website.
--Marshal Zeringue
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