Teachers are forever on the alert for plagiarism, but plagiarism is increasingly difficult to detect because Internet Websites proliferate swiftly on an enormous variety of topics. Like hydra-headed monsters, one site is deleted and another grows in its place. Classic Comics and Cliff Notes, the cribs of earlier generations, by comparison require long attention spans.
Ay, there's the rub. Short attention spans have replaced hyperactivity as the malady of the moment. Children are reading less, and fewer boys than girls read for pleasure. As a result, publishers resort to shock appeal to get boys to read, offering them toilet-humor titles such as "The Day My Butt Went Psycho" or "Sir Fartsalot Hunts the Booger," with a "hero" who seeks the riddle of the foul wind as though it were the holy grail.
Ben Schrank, president of Penguin's Razorbill children's book imprint, tells The Wall Street Journal that these books "will pull a boy away from a videogame." (We must take it on faith that the book is better.)
Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and author of "Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain," argues that how we read determines how we reason. We frame ideas in a different way when we read deeply in a book than when we simply decode information from the Internet. Consequently, we form different analytical connections and interpretations that affect the circuitry of our brains. Or to update Descartes, "How I read determines how I think."
Playwright Richard Foreman is colorfully blunter. "We are the pancake people," he writes, "spread wide and thin, as we connect with that vast network of information access by the mere touch of a button."
Like most things in life, what you get depends on whose buttons you push. But wisdom requires depth of understanding, not shallow data retrieval. That's what we have to teach our children to avoid the ultimate meltdown.