A new study from the National Endowment for Arts shows that literary reading among adults is declining and that reading, in general, among children and young adults is declining even more rapidly. After a child reaches middle school the amount of reading that they do for pleasure begins to decrease.
This is worrisome not only from the perspective of missing out on one of life’s greatest pleasures, but also for the future of conducting American democracy. It’s no accident that a majority of prison inmates in America are illiterate. We already have a government by television sound bites that will only fall deeper into trite name-calling rather conduct than true debate – as we grow precipitously stupider.
The upside? Some claim that we no longer need the kind of nuanced understanding of character, situation, and argument that only books can give us. All we have to do is turn on the computer/tv/radio and we are bombarded with information. In contrast, when you read you have to question, reread, look up a word or phrase, ask for help with a concept. It might be argued that Americans can communicate about their favorite sitcom, chat on myspace, and surf the internet so what is the problem?
Advancements in media and communication technologies seem to be making us intellectually simpler. Whomever the nominees of the two major parties will be in the upcoming election, I can assure you that we will not be witnessing Lincoln-Douglas level oratory or debate of prominent issues. Aren’t we supposed to be smarter now than we were in 1858? Knowledge is cyclical, as the Romans lost much of what they had accumulated with the onslaught of the dark ages, we can lose it as well.
Maybe all of this is outdated, and we should just raise kids to endlessly text each other all day. Only time will tell…
http://www.nea.gov/news/news07/TRNR.html
http://www.nea.gov/news/news04/ReadingAtRisk.html
