The Western Crisis of Literacy

Having read too many essays and articles on the Western crisis of literacy, I believe that most of them miss the point. They focus on teaching and learning methods, but neglect the broader crisis of life beyond the classroom. If people in the Western world no longer read for intellectual engagement, instruction, or pleasure, how is anything a student learns at school to be applied outside of school?

Even before I began to read as a child, I noticed that everyone around me lived with books. My parents, who had no money during the early years of their marriage, took me on weekly trips to the local public library, and even though both worked at the time, they read to me, or asked babysitters to read. Either way, I grew up with piles of books at hand, and I was encouraged to love them.

My point, here, is not that my parents were good people. (They were.) My point is that we lived within a culture of books, which made the skills of literacy easy to learn, and easy to apply.

This Western culture of books and applied literacy is dying. If we took note of the loss, and chose to save this culture, we could do it, but the task would be the work of generations, and we would really have to give a damn. So far, we seem willing to let the culture of reading fade into dead history. We have chosen to be ignorant, inarticulate fools; we did this by, and to, ourselves. And now, here we are: nowhere.