ThiemeWorks - The Missing Link

Among the key findings:

Americans are reading less - teens and young adults read less often and for shorter amounts of time compared with other age groups and with Americans of previous years.

Less than one-third of 13-year-olds are daily readers, a 14 percent decline from 20 years earlier. Among 17-year-olds, the percentage of non-readers doubled over a 20-year period, from nine percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004.1
On average, Americans ages 15 to 24 spend almost two hours a day watching TV, and only seven minutes of their daily leisure time on reading.
Americans are reading less well – reading scores continue to worsen, especially among teenagers and young males. By contrast, the average reading score of 9-year-olds has improved.

Reading scores for 12th-grade readers fell significantly from 1992 to 2005, with the sharpest declines among lower-level readers.
2005 reading scores for male 12th-graders are 13 points lower than for female 12th-graders, and that gender gap has widened since 1992.
Reading scores for American adults of almost all education levels have deteriorated, notably among the best-educated groups. From 1992 to 2003, the percentage of adults with graduate school experience who were rated proficient in prose reading dropped by 10 points, a 20 percent rate of decline.

As I said, my reply is in two parts: (1) the politics of hope and change, and (2) what can we do about literacy? (I don’t mean sounding out simple words – I mean reading complex paragraphs with comprehension).

The Politics of Hope and Change

(1) I understand your point, but as the younger people's posts about Obama we have been sharing suggest, they have NEVER had a president of whom they were proud. For eight years, one was a compulsive liar and getting blow jobs under his desk, and then, there is Mister Incoherent. Have you ever seen the film, The Great Escape? What is being pitched by “change” is a tunnel that makes it all the way to the trees, that there is a way out! That we CAN escape a nightmare of despair, shame, and depression. That's what "change" sells, something, anything, other than what the younger voters have known their whole lives long. If you heard the noise when Obama came through the curtain the other night (at the Democrats’ Founders Day Dinner n Milwaukee) , the depth of that yearning would be clear.

The editorial board of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel sat down with Obama and asked him serious questions and reported that the depth, intelligence, and realism of his answers led them to endorse him for the primary tomorrow (they saw Hillary's divisiveness as a deal-breaker).

A vote for Obama in tomorrow’s primary is a vote for possibility and potential. Everybody knows, as the song says, how detours ahead will inflect his and our best intentions. Thus has it always been, thus will it always be.

Mt friend adds: I realize this is probably old news to most of you, but the US National Endowment for the Arts has conducted a reading survey twice now (2004 and 2007) that can be found at http://www.nea.gov/news/news07/TRNR.html

The Real Decline in Reading, Writing and Thinking

(2) I have not read anything that contradicts this.

I did a keynote a few weeks ago for Deans and Provosts and profs of engineering schools on creativity and innovation at the Thunderbird School of Global Management. One of the profs said he is finding that his (college) students can understand words but often fail to comprehend the meaning of a whole paragraph. They can not easily discern, articulate or make useful the essence of a whole complex statement.

So, my question is this: what can we do? I mean that seriously, not we as individuals, but "we."

I have spoken at Def Con (The premiere Las Vegas hacker conference, paired with Black Hat Briefings) for 12 years now and from the very beginning, the subtext if not the explicit text was about doing research, thinking critically, being "good hackers" in the sense of doing everything necessary to see how something works, so one can access the deeper levels - not just of programs, machines, or code, but comprehensive and coherent bodies of thought. I always try to embed an "upward call" in the message, and some have gotten it, as well as my obvious commitment to them and equally obvious respect. That feedback loop of mutual energy sustains that particular dialog.

Yet ... when I see a feature on Ren, a Japanese girl who thumbs out little text "novels" on cell phones, and hear that she is now a millionaire because they brought out two of her little heart-throb tales in hardcover and they sold 400,000 copies each ... and I get one of a series of stories I am writing back from the Boston Review and the editor writes, this is "enthralling and so well written," but we just don't have room for it, and small press publishers send back the proposal because "we have no money, publish a very few titles/year" and mainstream foreign-owned as a rule publishers will not speak to you because publishing is 100% marketing and product delivery, as Bob Woodward said Simon and Schuster told him when they wanted a new topic before the ink was dry on his last book ... (he added, OK, my next book will be about the New York publishing industry, and his editor laughed and laughed, then said, great! and I have the title! ... “My Last Book” ... to which Woodward added, “and he wasn‘t kidding” ... and on and on ... so as a writer without an agent and a serious reader, it is difficult not to despair.

We discussed earlier how technology is often misused in school trying to be trendy at the expense of real teaching, how it is not integrated intelligently with critical skills of research and analysis. All of my talks to teachers at in-services have been about integrating technology so the world of reading and writing and the worlds of clicking and quick fluid visuals can cross-pollinate, so the digital world will recontextualize, not eliminate, reading and writing and discursive thinking ...

and what teachers often say, and what some of the professors at that conference said, and what people in government bureaucracies often say is always about the culture and how it inhibits them and beats down their best intentions, taking the life out of them, making them count the days until they die or retire. It's about cultures that assimilate them and generate feelings of powerless to do anything significant within their constraints.

I think of a keynote I did for executives from a bank for a planning retreat when the digital world was just coming. I interviewed a dozen top people at the bank and every single one spoke of "the bank" as something that was in the way of their creativity. When I had them off site, I asked them all, where is the bank? As they looked around they could see that the bank that constrained them was not something physical but "the bank in their heads," a paradigm of limited possibility that they had internalized. So the challenge was how to change the model of banking in their heads and the behaviors and actions it had determined. (the underlying subtext which I named, causing a deep silence, was, do you want the bank to succeed in its current form? Or do you want to maximize the value of your stock options so when you are bought, you can cash out? That, I said, will determine not what you say, but what you choose to do. The answer to that was signified by the silence - that bank was bought, and then THAT bank was bought in turn, and lots of employees are gone).

This was also the bank where a guy lingered after a different talk and tried to tell me what the culture was like. He had worn a blue shirt to his first meeting eight years earlier and everyone stared at him. He realized that everyone else wore a white shirt. He has never worn anything but white shirts for eight years, but in the bathroom stall the other day, he heard himself referred to as "the guy in the blue shirt."

Eight years. EIGHT YEARS.

So the question remains: assuming we don't want to be just a bunch of grumpy old white men (those of us who qualify for that club, that is) - what can we do? How can we contribute, how can we make a difference, however slight?

What can we do?