Thoughts on Reading

I just finished reading Thomas Piketty's massive Capital in the Twenty-first Century – 577 pages of text. Well, not quite. In fairness I skipped to the sections that deal directly with the United States and bypassed those about France (the home country of the author, the book is a translation) and other European and Asian countries. I'm not writing a review of the book here. Despite all that text, its central proposition is straightforward: to address our growing separation between rich and poor we should tax wealth.

Rather, I want only to comment on what is expected of the reader of this tome, because unfortunately I believe that many people would be put off by it. Of course the very size (and weight) of the book is itself a put-off, but I will pass over that in what follows.

I didn't apply one of those standard reading tests, but I rate the reading demand to be that of an average high school student. (In my thinking about that average I did not include the thousands of so-called high school students who are not participating in the educational experience.) Although some of the sentences are long, I did not find one that I could not both understand and parse. Surely this says something about the translator, Arthur Goldhammer, as well as the author.

And most of Piketty's points are made through very well displayed graphs.

But there is some math. Very little, but some. There are many ratios: capital/income, for example. And there are two or three formulas, each of which is of the form  a = r × b, but the a and b are printed as alpha and beta. Sadly, I believe that that is enough to turn off a great many readers who could otherwise gain from this particular text.

There are two things about that equation that are problematic for readers. Just math turns many away and there are Greek letters. Never mind that the math is simple multiplication of the same form as A = l × w for a rectangle; it still shrieks "Math!" to many of us. And never mind that the formula with Greek letters is identical to the formula a = r × b; those are symbols foreign to us.

Now I am not suggesting that we need to address these specific problems in our instruction. There are plenty that are related to them. For example, the sum and integral signs are turn-offs, but each of them represents a sum: in a scientific publication you might see  Sx, with that S representing one of the forms of sigma, which simply means add up all the x's. (The fonts allowed here do not include Greek symbols.)

Having said all that, I have no simple answer to the problem I am trying to raise here. I guess it is simply that each of us who deals with learners of any stripe – in or out of the classroom, wives and husbands included – needs to seek ways to get those learners to relax in order to accept simple ideas that may be dressed up in scary clothes. I believe that this is one of the hardest and most important tasks that a teacher faces. And the way to do that is not to use the approach that I am ashamed to admit I have occasionally been driven to: "Can't you understand that, you blockhead!"

I hope that some you who read this note will have better ideas about how to address this kind of problem.