This country’s declining literacy is one of my main concerns. For years I've told newspapers they should be more worried because they in particular need readers. Now I say the same thing to writers of all kinds. Do everything you can to make sure children learn to read.
Weirdly enough, our newspaper seem comfortable with committing suicide. You don't see anything in the media, month after month, year after year, explaining to parents why so many children are struggling readers. For me, this indifference seems equally sinful and dumb. There is no sense of addressing a national emergency. But that's what we face.
Writers, because they spend their whole lives reading, forget that many millions of people actually do not know how to do it. We have nearly 50,000,000 functional illiterates in our country, that is, borderline readers. This large group is unlikely to buy books. These victims will be miserable throughout their lives because of semi-literacy. Why are we allowing this?
One problem with this topic is that it's hard to explain to people what you mean when you talk about declining literacy, greater functional illiteracy, and similar terms. Here is a helpful comment (left on one of my articles) that will give everyone a sharper sense of our dystopia:
“I agree with the author and would add that students that cannot read well also fail to write well and ultimately cannot think and reason well.
As a criminal investigator. I had several occasions to obtain the witness statement from children at the junior and senior level of several American high schools.
Typically, in addition to rampant misspelling of words, there was improper use of words, sentences that simply did not make any sense or relate to the topic at hand, and most notably, a lack of any punctuation.
It was not unusual to obtain a story written in multiple pages that were written as a single sentence. These are the same students who have trouble reading a few paragraphs from Dick and Jane.”
The problem is simply stated. The Education Establishment has tried for 75 years to eliminate phonics, even though that's the normal way to teach a phonetic language such as English. So, bizarrely enough, our biggest problem is illiteracy.
Fortunately, this is an easy problem to fix. Simply get rid of the mistake called Sight-words. Almost all students can start reading quickly with phonics. First-graders typically learn in four or five months.
(Memorizing the English language one word at a time is clearly impossible, except perhaps for people with a photographic memory. Short article explains why sight-words are a nightmare for children: Sight-Words – The Big Stupid.)
(Anyone who wants to know more about the problems in American public education, please look at Saving K-12 — What happened to our public schools? How do we fix them?. This book is I'm sure the best short explanation of what went wrong. It’s also a great gift for smart friends.)
with sadness I read your article,
so often the eager Little Reader in my classroom who loved being read to and reading doing DEAR ….drop everything and read, period, who carried home books to read with family each
I watched in later grades, as they vowed their hatred for reading
could it be that 'education' has moved tests grades, and killed the love for reading
Never stop writing
m