Anonymous Patron writes “A group of librarians from Limestone County Schools have issued a challenge to members of the school board.
The librarians, represented by Creekside Librarian Janet Saczawa at Monday night’s Limestone County School Board meeting, want each board member to read the book “Whale Talk” from cover to cover. More from
Yeah right…
I have a chunk of cash betting that no school board exists containing members who are all literate. School boards are popularity contests for failed politicians.
Re:Yeah right…
Why don’t we define “literate” for the purposes of this challenge? Do you mean “able to read and write”, or do you mean, “uses the ability to read and write in order to read things that kylere subjectively judges to be ‘worthy'” ? Because I have to say, I’ve seen an awful lot of text-based activities heralded as “proof” of “illiteracy”.
(And in my experience, school boards are not so much the resting place of failed politicians, as the training ground of would-be pols just making their first baby steps in politics. Not much better, perhaps, but definitely different.)
Re:Yeah right…
Reading, on the other hand, must be carefully taught and, usually, without much luck.
The trouble is that we mislead ourselves by our own definition of literacy. We can teach almost anyone (if we try hard enough and long enough) to read traffic signs and to make out instructions and warnings on posters, and to puzzle out newspaper headlines. Provided the printed message is short and reasonably simple and the motivation to read it is great, almost anyone can read.
And if this is called literacy, then almost every American is literate. But if you then begin to wonder why so few Americans read books (the average American out of school, I understand, does not even read one complete book a year), you are being misled by your own use of the term literate.
Few people who are literate in the sense of being able to read a sign that says NO SMOKING ever becomes so familiar with the printed word and so at ease with the process of quickly decoding by eye the small and complicated shapes that stand for modulated sound that they are willing to tackle any extended reading task — as for instance making their way through one thousand consecutive words.
–Isaac Asimov, The Tragedy of the Moon, pg 185
And the difference between the reader and the non-reader grows steadily wider with the years. The more a reader reads, the more information he picks up, the larger his vocabulary grows, the more familiar various literary allusions become. It becomes steadily easier and more fun for him to read, while for the non-reader it becomes steadily harder and less worth while.
–Isaac Asimov, The Tragedy of the Moon, pg 186
Holy dust jacket Batman!
Asking someone to actually read a book before they decide if it should be censored.
My goodness next you will want them to taste the casserole before they decide they don’t like it.
Re:Yeah right…
Okay, assuming I am Webster today, I would prefer that literate be defined as;
Able to read any non-technical material and understand the content, with the ability to understand meanings of unfamiliar words based on the context. A considerable step above newspaper literacy.
Re:Yeah right…
Uh, you do realize the “statistics” on how many books Americans read are cooked, don’t you? The most recent study I saw (within the past six months), peddling the usual scary statistics, required the “book” to be “literature”, and then defined “literature” quite narrowly as prose fiction–no poetry, no plays, no biography, no history, no essay collections…gee, I wonder why.
A failure to read prose fiction for pleasure certainly makes someone’s life a little bit poorer, but if that same person is reading David McCullough’s biography of John Adams, Joseph Ellis’s Founding Brothers, any of the vast quantity of non-fiction about the US Civil War or WWII, or the dueling bookcases full of current political essay collections, they may be many things, but they are not, in any meaningful sense, illiterate.
I don’t know how old you are (either Fang-Face or kylere), but I’m betting at least one of you is old enough to recognize that bookstores are much more common now than they were twenty years ago–more common, larger, more likely to have or be able to easily obtain odd little books from odd little publishers.
And if the standard brick & mortar bookstores don’t have it, you hop online and buy it from Amazon or at least a score of other online booksellers. Who do you think is keeping all those booksellers in business, if “no one” is reading–if the literate class is shrinking as a percentage of the population?
My maternal grandparents were actually illiterate. (BTW, my grandmother, who was illiterate in two languages, had no trouble with traffic signs and warning posters; you’re quite right that doesn’t by itself constitute literacy, and quite wrong that it’s hard to teach to anyone of average or near-average intelligence.) Anyone who’s read Jimmy Carter’s autobiography (An Hour Before Daybreak, I think was the title?), will surely remember his discussion of school, and how unfair it seemed to him and his siblings that, as the children of the largest landowner in the county, they were expected to attend school every day, unlike their friends, whose less well-off families routinely kept them out of school for substantial parts of every school year to help with the farm work. Think about what that meant for general levels education (and remember that these were the white kids; the black families didn’t have state-supported schools in Georgia then), and consider that Carter is my parents’ generation, not my grandparents’.
More people are reading, more people are able to read, more people are reading more different things–which has the ironic effect of depressing total sales for any individual title, but is still pretty interesting. The Waldenbooks in the mall nearest me has three shelf-units devoted to manga–one of those categories of books that many people are eager to define as “illiteracy” but which requires the ability to read fairly easily, along with cookbooks, self-help books, how-tos on a bewildering range of subjects, etc.
The people reading those books may not be getting the full benefit that they could get from their literacy, but what they lack isn’t fluency in reading skills.
Re:Holy dust jacket Batman!
Absolutely . . . If they can’t be bothered to read the entire work and consider it in context, then they forfeit their right to comment on it.