This conclusion is drawn from results of the National Assessment of Adult LIteracy conducted by the US Department of Education in 2003.
When the test was last administered, in 1992, 40 percent of the nation's college graduates scored at the proficient level, meaning that they were able to read lengthy, complex English texts and draw complicated inferences. But on the 2003 test, only 31 percent of the graduates demonstrated those high-level skills. There were 26.4 million college graduates.
The college graduates who in 2003 failed to demonstrate proficiency included 53 percent who scored at the intermediate level and 14 percent who scored at the basic level, meaning they could read and understand short, commonplace prose texts.
Three percent of college graduates who took the test in 2003, representing some 800,000 Americans, demonstrated "below basic" literacy, meaning that they could not perform more than the simplest skills, like locating easily identifiable information in short prose.
On the positive side, literacy scores for black and Asian students increased between 1992 and 2003. However, scores for latino students declined.
Sombering news, but who or what is at fault?
Grover J. Whitehurst, director of an institute within the Department of Education that helped to oversee the test, said he believed that the literacy of college graduates had dropped because a rising number of young Americans in recent years had spent their free time watching television and surfing the Internet.
"We're seeing substantial declines in reading for pleasure, and it's showing up in our literacy levels," he said.
In some ways, this bit of news amounts to a cliché--"Johnny can't read because he's spending too much time in front of the TV!" I've heard this complaint in the background noise of my entire conscious life. Sort of like "Humans are destroying their environment!" One of those complex, intractable problems that triggers spasms of acute panic which (in most of us) soon relax into shrugs.
I don't have the luxury of shrugging off this literacy crisis. I see it every day in the classroom. Last week, in the personal statement I wrote for my annual evaluation, I said that discussing readings had become almost a waste of time. For most of the twelve years I've taught, I've been aware that many students consider reading assignments optional, even when they're held accountable for them in some way, via quizzes, examinations, whatnot. But during much of that time, students usually showed decent comprehension of what they did read. Now, particularly in first semester composition classes, exploring anything beyond the general topic of a reading is like...well, like my "snowshoe walk" the other day, or like it would have been if the snow were 5 feet instead of 5 inches deep. And little of the style or strategy we examine in the readings carries over to the writing. I'm supposed to be helping to reverse this decline in literacy, but many times it feels futile. At least as I'm approaching the task now. As I said in my personal statement last week, it's time to try something new.
I have some colleagues who dismiss, or outright ridicule, the idea of assigning readings in a writing class. Written assignments should come from students freely exploring their ideas, then expanding them through reasearch and revision, they believe. It must work for them, but for me something about that approach doesn't add up. For one thing, regular reading helps one absorb basic print conventions which are very difficult to teach in the classroom, such as when apostrophes are used, and that "woman" and "women" are not the same word. (I'm almost resigned to plural apostrophes--or rather, plural apostrophe's--becoming a standard feature of printed English). But more importantly, it confronts one with new ideas, and with striking ways of communicating ideas. It puts one in conversation with something other than the routine, and consequently makes that routine a richer and more animated thing (I'd like to say it liberates us from routine, but sooner or later we all find one). Those functions aren't unique to reading, but few other media conduct them as readily, or as intimately. Reading is an interchange between work and audience to a greater degree than almost any visual medium. If a college education is meant not only to impart knowledge but to draw one into a community that creates knowledge--a profession, discipline, or an engaged citizenry, for that matter--I think that interchange is essential.
I guess I'm not sure what I'm doing here except wringing my hands. That and reminding myself that literacy is a feeble asset when it's taught as a discrete skill rather than cultivated as a habit of living (and it wasn't so long ago that habit was broadly cultivated, and wasn't just an ideal of self-styled literati). The question I'm left with is, what does that habit look like today?
Tag: Education
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