Kinda hard to do when all you are doing is smokin' the demon weed and playing the video games.
Maybe the dumb one is me. I thought reading would be good for me.
Instead, the more I read, the more enraged I become over the injustice in this world.
"Young people reading a lot less; Report laments the social costs" by David Mehegan/Boston Globe November 19, 2007
We know what young people are doing more of: watching television, surfing the Web, listening to their iPods, talking on cellphones, and instant-messaging their friends. But a new report released today by the National Endowment for the Arts makes clear what they're doing a lot less of: reading.
The report paints a dire picture of plummeting levels of reading among young people over the past two decades.
It is not just the amount of reading. According to the report, reading ability has fallen as well.
Only about a third of high school seniors read at a proficient level.
NEA chairman Dana Gioia, by phone from Washington:
"And proficiency is not a high standard. We're not asking them to be able to read Proust in the original. We're talking about reading the daily newspaper."
Yeah, we failed the kids. It ain't all there fault.
We sold them on this gadget, brain-numbing, mass-consuming straw-suck!
Things are not much better among college students. In 2005, almost 40 percent of college freshmen (and 35 percent of seniors) read nothing at all for pleasure, and 26 percent (28 percent of seniors) read less than one hour per week.
So it's a fading art, huh? Reading is? I'm a DINOSAUR, hey!
The report does not explain why youth reading has declined, but Gioia said he suspects three main reasons:
"First, something is not happening in our educational system. Second, we are surrounded by nonstop media, but for the most part it does not acknowledge reading. When the media made a celebrity of J.K. Rowling, 10 million people bought her book. Oprah Winfrey put 'Anna Karenina' on the best-seller list. Third, our lives are completely cluttered with a million gadgets."
As per globalist plan, no?
Indeed, the report suggests that multitasking is a factor. It found that more than half of middle and high school students use other media most or some of the time while reading, and that 20 percent of the time they spend reading they are also watching TV, playing video games, sending messages, or otherwise using a computer.
Besides plotting statistical trends, the report cites economic consequences. Seventy-two percent of employers rated high school graduates deficient in writing, and 38 percent cited reading deficiency. One out of five American workers reads at a lower level than necessary to do his or her job. Not surprisingly, proficient readers are more likely to attain management jobs and higher incomes.
Then we are all dumb? And where is my promotion?
Doesn't work if you don't follow prescribed orthodoxy?
Possibly the most striking finding is that, regardless of income, levels of reading for pleasure correlate closely with levels of social life, voting, and political activism, participation in culture and fine arts, volunteerism, charity work, and even regular exercise.
Gioia: "The poorest Americans who read did twice as much volunteering and charity work as the richest who did not read. The habit of regular reading awakens something inside a person that makes him or her take their own life more seriously and at the same time develops the sense that other people's lives are real."
ABSOLUTELY! And how about the heartless richers, 'eh, readers?
Timothy Shanahan, an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and past president of the International Reading Association, said that finding confirms previous studies:
"If you're low in reading ability, not only would you not read the newspaper, but you won't watch news on TV or listen to it on radio. You're less likely to take part in activities like sports or church. Being low in literacy is self-isolating, tends to push you out of culture altogether."
That's why there are BARS!!!!
Patricia S. Schroeder, president and chief executive of the Association of American Publishers, said part of the problem could be that adults can make children feel that reading is a duty. A common complaint she hears from children and young adults is that few books relate to their lives or interests:
"Reading is not really easy, unless they get into something they want to read about."
And if it something useless like history or politics or current events or just literature, then the degree isn't even worth it.
Take it from me, I KNOW!
