Clip from my evening reading

First chapter of Adler and Van Doren's book titled How to Read a Book

This is a book for readers and for those who wish to become readers. Particularly, it is for readers of books. Even more particularly, it is for those whose
main purpose in reading books is to gain increased understanding.

By “readers” we mean people who are still accustomed, as almost every literate and intelligent person used to be, to gain a large share of their information
about and their understanding of the world from the written word. Not all of
it, of course; even in the days before radio and television, a certain amount of
information and understanding was acquired through spoken words and through
observation. But for intelligent and curious people that was never enough. They
knew that they had to read too, and they did read.

There is some feeling nowadays that reading is not as necessary as it once
was. Radio and especially television have taken over many of the functions
once served by print, just as photography has taken over functions once served
by painting and other graphic arts. Admittedly, television serves some of these
functions extremely well; the visual communication of news events, for example,
has enormous impact. The ability of radio to give us information while we are
engaged in doing other things—for instance, driving a car—is remarkable, and
a great saving of time. But it may be seriously questioned whether the advent
of modern communications media has much enhanced our understanding of the
world in which we live.

Perhaps we know more about the world than we used to, and insofar as
knowledge is prerequisite to understanding, that is all to the good. But knowledge is not as much a prerequisite to understanding as is commonly supposed.
We do not have to know everything about something in order to understand it;
too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understanding as too few.
There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment
of understanding.

One of the reasons for this situation is that the very media we have mentioned
are so designed as to make thinking seem unnecessary (though this is only an
appearance). The packaging of intellectual positions and views is one of the
most active enterprises of some of the best minds of our day. The viewer of
television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a
whole complex of elements—all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully
selected data and statistics—to make it easy for him to “make up his own mind”
with the minimum of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so
effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind
at all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like
inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and “plays
back” the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has performed
acceptably without having had to think.