In a recent post at The Bookshop Blog, Nora O’Neill has written an impassioned plea for booksellers to consider the issue of literacy. She provides a litany of startling U.S. statistics:
“In some states they use the third grade reading proficiency scores to estimate future prison need. Why? 85% of prison inmates cannot read proficiently. Simply increasing the graduation rate by 5% would save the US $5 BILLION annually in prison related costs…Every 26 seconds, a kid drops out of school in the US. Over their lifetime, each high school drop out costs the US government roughly$260,000….One in seven adults in the US can not read this post…”
Without fact checking all her stats—or indeed, looking for Canadian equivalents—I’m still moved to share her article. She makes the argument that, for booksellers, encouraging literacy is good for business in the long term. This is a reasonable approach to take, but it also disappoints me a little. I find it vaguely sad that Ms. O’Neil feels compelled to look for financial incentives to interest booksellers in literacy programs. I’m not naïve enough to think that all booksellers have to love books, but overall, it doesn’t make much sense to get into the business unless you do.
And, frankly, a love of books should be enough of a motivator for anyone to champion literacy.
Beyond straightforward literacy, the concept of the benefits of being well read has faded under the pressures of increased specialization. I’m continually shocked by the people I meet in the course of my day job—white-collar professionals with very large salaries—who can’t successfully string two sentences together. And this inability to write properly is the direct result of a life-long disinterest in reading. But what’s even more distressing is that these people don’t care at all about what I see as a gap in their education—it apparently has no impact on their earning potential.
This is where the utility arguments concerning money fall down for me. These people are literate, but they are also limited and don’t know it. I’m not making any kind of elitist stand about what they read either: they don’t read at all. In fact, a small part of what I get paid for is digesting very large documents and providing the highlights to people disinclined to read them themselves—who in some cases are my superiors.
I think the quality of communications in the business world is probably declining overall with the decline in readers. Being a book-lover expands all of your language skills—it helps improve public discourse. The people I encounter every day who don’t read are missing something I consider essential in their daily life.
I won’t even attempt to convey what I think non-readers are missing in terms of the uplifting power of the art in literature—that’s a sucker’s game if you can’t even get someone to pick up a paperback at the airport.
Since he was a baby, my son was read to every night. He’s been encouraged from birth to see books as a valuable part of everyday life. I kept reading to him before bed even after the point he could read the same books to himself—just to enjoy the act of reading out loud together. I think he had read Lord of the Rings himself by the age of 8 or 9. I’m thrilled to have contributed to the development of another book nerd in this world and hope that he carries on the tradition.
I’m appalled that literacy still isn’t a given in all industrialized nations. We should all support literacy programs, whether bookseller of punter, as an essential service like water.
