Reading skills in steep decline

Waterbury Republican-American ^ | January 4, 2006 | Editorial

[Graybeard58]

Are America's youth graduating from college with a language proficiency that goes beyond "duh"? That's a question that has puzzled educators and literary experts as they perused recent adult literary assessment results that show reading proficiency among college graduates has tumbled in the past decade.

An astounded Michael Gorman, president of the American Library Association, said only 31 percent of college graduates can read a complex book and extrapolate from it. "That's not saying much for the remainder."

Experts admit to not knowing how to explain the decline in reading comprehension. What's disturbing, said Mark S. Schneider, commissioner of the federal National Center for Education Statistics, "is that the assessment is not designed to test your understanding of Proust, but to test your ability to read labels."

The study, conducted by the center, tested the ability of adults to carry out such tasks as reading and understanding prescription labels or computing the per-ounce cost of food items by reading the data on the containers. More than 19,000 took the test.

The drop to 31 percent represents a substantial decline from the 40 percent who were found to be reading-proficient in 1992.

While education experts admit to being stumped, parents are no doubt in various states of reaction, ranging from anxiety and disbelief to anger and loss of confidence in education from top to bottom.

Certainly, the problem could be blamed on such conveniences as listening to a novel on a CD, or watching a movie version on a DVD, instead of actually reading the book in print. And why bother the brain with figuring the cost per ounce when a calculator is within easy reach?

Advances in technology have given us modern conveniences, but usually at a cost of time-honored skills. The telephone and its successor, e-mail, have rung the death knell for writing letters. Once the art is lost, so are the durable records of cherished correspondence. With the telephone, conversations are gone when you hang up. The durability of e-mails depends on the reliability of your computer and storage discs.

But the damage done when books, and especially textbooks, are incomprehensible to untrained minds is a heavy price to pay for the faddish use of electronic gadgets. Not only does understanding suffer, but initiative and imagination are suffocated.

[A CA Guy]

Probably part of the plan for the teachers union.

An uneducated mind is a dependent one more likely to vote Democrat and think liberally.

[domenad]

Take the Xbox, throw it in the pool, and read to your kids, people.

[July 4th]

Or give the Xbox to me. I know how to read.

[GaltMeister]

Huked on foniks werked fur mi!

[RightWhale]

Anybody should be able to read Proust: easy, light reading. Reading the NYT for understanding requires having critical skills that apparently are missing from our public schools.

[bannie]

Freshmen teachers have to teach remedial reading instead of the likes of Silas Marner--to most of the kids. There are, however, bright stars in the dark sky.

[Turbopilot]

Typical media hype. Look at what was tested:

The study, conducted by the center, tested the ability of adults to carry out such tasks as reading and understanding prescription labels or computing the per-ounce cost of food items by reading the data on the containers.

They can read fine! They just don't get prescription labels or unit costs because they don't know science or math.

< /s >

[JamesP81]

Take the Xbox, throw it in the pool, and read to your kids, people.

No kidding. I remember that my mom would read to me when I was less than a year old, and it turned out very well for me.

Fast forward 20 years and I was able to read the entire Lord of the Rings in about 8 days. And I'm doing my best to get my own writing published, although admittedly, that isn't going so well. At least not yet.

I suspect the majority of FReepers are quite literate, however.

[garyhope]

If you think the reading is bad, you should also try and read some of the really appalling writing by so called "educated" adults. I have mature friends whose writing is shocking in it's incompetence.

[Alberta's Child]

Someone here on FR made the very astute observation a while back that in two generations this country has gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching remedial reading in college.

[Dark Skies]

Certainly, the problem could be blamed on such conveniences as listening to a novel on a CD

I used to read books on tape when I travelled and I found the process quite a bit more involved than watching a movie.

I also found that listening to a speaker wasn't bad for retention or understanding. Unlike reading with my eyes, I found I did a lot of rewinding and re-listening to certain parts.

[dfwgator]

I...have taken the evelyn woodhead sped redding corse an it has improved my compren....tion 100 hunnert per.....cent.

[Lizavetta]

Moosen.

[thoughtomator]

Posting skills still as sharp as ever, though!

[KarlInOhio]

Maybe it is because attention spans ha...oooh, look a bug is crawling on my monitor.

Seriously, an Irish Setter has a longer attention span than a high school senior.

[dinoparty]

Exactly. Why are people so dense that they do not understand the damage they are doing to their kids (and to society) by letting them become addicted to video games, ungrammatical chatroom lingo and hiphop music? Many parents do not understand the difference between pop culture and reality.

[lady lawyer]

When the educational establishment loses all interest in academic standards and is interested only in "diversity," what do you expect?

[snarks_when_bored]

Experts admit to not knowing how to explain the decline in reading comprehension.

Spoken words accompanied by moving pictures (and music) have replaced books as sources of information and entertainment. We're becoming in some ways a pre-literate society. As Yuri Manin has put it:

The society we live in becomes more and more dominated by mass media/computer generated images (to which visual representations of “fractals”, sets of non–integer dimension, marginally belong). Paradoxically, this technologically driven evolution away from “logocentrism”, often associated with modernity and progress, by relying heavily upon right brain mental faculties, projects us directly into dangerously archaic states of collective consciousness.

(from his PDF article, The Notion of Dimension in Geometry and Algebra)

[Revolting cat!]

Hey, but they can all read this, then come to FR and argue it's great lit!