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Wither Reading?
As fewer and fewer people read for pleasure and as literacy rates continue to decline, is there any future for the printed word outside of one’s job?
This week a couple of interesting surveys have been published. One, conducted by the OECD in thirty-one wealthy countries around the world, revealed that one-fifth of adults do no better than a primary school child when it comes to literacy and numeracy. Some countries famously do far worse than others, with the USA being particularly rich in adults who are effectively illiterate and innumerate. The latter should come as no surprise to anyone who’s traveled around the USA. Even as far back as the early 1990s I was struck by the fact that not a single US citizen I knew, of any age, could perform even basic mental arithmetic. Meanwhile, US English is famously restricted both in terms of grammar (only three tenses rather than British English’s twelve plus subjunctive) and vocabulary (the average US citizen employs around 500 words in their daily life as opposed to around 3,700 for an average British speaker of English, hence the US reliance on phrasal verbs). Things have only grown worse since the early 1990s, and the trend has also spread across the rest of the rich world.
