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Reading; who needs it?

By Sean Aqui | Related entries in Bad Decisions, Dumb Things Said By Smart People, Education, Ideas, News, Technology

In case any of you despair about the workers who will be supporting you in retirement:

Educational doomsayers are again up in arms at a new adult literacy study showing that less than 5 percent of college graduates can read a complex book and extrapolate from it.

The obsessive measurement of long-form literacy is once more being used to flail an education trend that is in fact going in just the right direction. Today’s young people are not able to read and understand long stretches of text simply because in most cases they won’t ever need to do so.

It’s time to acknowledge that in a truly multimedia environment of 2025, most Americans don’t need to understand more than a hundred or so words at a time, and certainly will never read anything approaching the length of an old-fashioned book. We need a frank reassessment of where long-form literacy itself lies in the spectrum of skills that a modern nation requires of its workers.

Yes, clearly the world will be a better place when nobody is able to process ideas too complicated to be expressed in 100 words or less….


This entry was posted on Thursday, September 14th, 2006 and is filed under Bad Decisions, Dumb Things Said By Smart People, Education, Ideas, News, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Reading; who needs it?”

  1. probligo Says:
    September 14th, 2006 at 10:32 pm

    … or in less than 15 seconds of video.

  2. Kevin Says:
    September 15th, 2006 at 8:59 am

    Please link to a shorter article next time. I couldn’t get through more than a couple of paragraphs before losing interest.

  3. James Says:
    September 15th, 2006 at 12:16 pm

    I get physically sick when I see things like this… are we THAT busy that we can’t be “bothered” to properly educate ourselves?

    I got VERY angry one day @ work when I left for lunch to go buy a book and was literally chastized by my coworkers for READING. Every single person, with the exception of the asst. office manager said “Read is for idiots… it’s boring”.

    I feel very sorry for them.

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