Read for pleasure lately? Doubt it—in college, chances are that students have very little time to dedicate to reading material that is not required for a class, and here at Puget Sound, many students lack the time or motivation to even indulge in reading what is required. This trend reflects the habits of a majority of adult Americans.
When I do occasionally crack open a required reading for a class (i.e. midterm in two hours), I often notice something interesting: that my mind is completely blown. Such books and articles describe situations and ideas desperate for exposure. “Why don’t I read this? Why hasn’t everyone read this?” I ask myself as I am inspired to get more involved in activism, do more research on world systems and spread the written word.
Thing is, most adults don’t (or can’t) read on a regular basis, and kids are developing A.D.D. from increasingly rapid information absorption (Cracked.com anyone?). So how can we motivate the young and old to read, and foster literacy education?
By speaking a language we all understand: the language of money. Pay the people to think so they may be inspired to act on the world stage.
Government funds should be poured into education (certainly not taken away, as we have recently seen) but nonetheless, when school stops, so may the reading and the learning. The nation needs to take steps beyond the classroom to promote literacy and critical thought, and a good use of funding may be to offer citizens a monetary incentive.
Illiteracy is a growing problem in America, which ranks far below other nations in terms of literacy, including most eastern European countries and other industrialized nations. Literacy is defined by the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) as “using printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential.”
According to ProLiteracy.org, low literacy’s effects cost the U.S. $225 billion or more each year in non-productivity in the workforce, crime and loss of tax revenue due to unemployment. Globally, it is linked to gender abuse, extreme poverty, high infant mortality and the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other preventable diseases. Individual illiteracy leads to a lack of knowledge, information and understanding about the world and systems in which these people live, which advances these problems.
In our country, 14 percent of the adult population does not read well enough to understand a newspaper story written at the eighth grade level (ProLiteracy). According to the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), “reading scores for American adults of almost all education levels have deteriorated, notably among the best-educated groups. [There has been] a 20 percent rate of decline.”
This lowers the potential of even literate American citizens, whose decline in proficiency is likely due to a lack of practice.
“Potential” in this context is not limited to the workforce, but includes the tendency to involve oneself in the community, politics and culture—hell, life.
In 2007, the NEA published a research report entitled “To Read or Not to Read: Reading at Risk.” Data within the report showed that “by every measure captured by the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, literary readers lead more robust lifestyles than non-readers.”
The surveys conducted revealed that individuals self-reported to be literate engaged significantly more in the arts, cultural excursions, exercise and voting.
This same report noted that volunteering rates rose with number of books read over the past year.
I attribute this to the way that different reading materials, particularly non-fiction, can expose readers to social issues that they didn’t know about before. The report stated that “because of this active empathy, [people] contribute in measurable ways to civic and social improvements.”
As I mentioned earlier, many of books that can absolutely rock your world are required readings for some classes. Naked Imperialism and other required readings for my seminar, for example, surprised me with so much information that they inspired me to study politics alongside science.
Countless books have expanded and changed minds to better fit reality, and this is a necessary step for the mass mobilization of our society towards the greater good.
If people will not bother or try to read otherwise, we should pay them to do it. This incentive is already used by Google’s ReaderAdvantageTM, which pays people who read on Google Scholar and other Google i-gadgets in points they can redeem for “cool stuff.” It would definitely be attractive for the youth, such as high school and college students, as well as adults who’d like some cash on the side.
There should be no question that it is necessary for Americans in general to increase both their proficiency in literacy and their frequency of reading, and that a system that highly encourages this needs to be implemented as soon as possible. There is potential for great effects on society from the ground up—I’d pay to see that.