Last month we published information about Pew Research’s Younger Americans’ Reading and Library Habits study. The folks over at BrainTrack have taken the time to break it down further to provide some additional context and ideas.
Oh, those punk kids today! With their iPhones and hippity-hop music and My Little G.I. Joe the Explorers! In our day, we read books all the time, every time! But they don’t, and they’re stupid! Stupid, I tells ya!
Except not really.
Look, if this country is headed downhill at the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow, it isn’t entirely the result of children failing to engage with literature. Could parents and schools do a better job of encouraging them to read? Absolutely. And we’ll get to that. But that doesn’t necessarily chime the death knell for America, either. Especially considering how the literacy rate continues hovering around 99%. That last 1% needs closing, of course. All United States residents deserve opportunities to learn how to read. However, to tout it as indicative that the country suffers from an incoming collapse of stability and morality epitomizes the concept of hyperbole. Truth be told, the reality involves some negative trends that need some addressing, but plenty of driven organizations and individuals devote themselves to overturning them. We can’t dismiss concerns. We also can’t declare them signifiers of an incoming societal apocalypse, either.
Read on at The State of Young Readers in America at the BrainTrack Blog.
About BrainTrack
BrainTrack is a higher education and career resource with worldwide reach. It features a directory of the world’s universities and colleges with over 13,000 institutions listed from over 190 countries. The site is the oldest (since 1996) and largest directory of universities and colleges on the Web. BrainTrack’s goal is to help visitors make better decisions about their education and careers.
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