The ‘Literacy Crisis’ — More Than You Wanted to Know
It seems that every few weeks, a new article or video on the literacy crisis goes viral. Whether this is a video on YouTube, an article in The Atlantic, or a post on Substack, the message tends to be more or less the same. Americans are reading less; college students struggle to read whole or difficult texts; early childhood education is in decline.
Shortly after making that video, I decided to take another look at the issue, dealing less with anecdotes and the history of reading education and looking at how American students’ literacy levels are faring in the modern education system.
I am including these videos in the introduction of this article for a few reasons. First, to show that I played some role – the size of that role is unclear – in establishing the narrative that there is a literacy crisis. Second, to highlight how, in that second video, I discovered that some of the figures cited in discussions of the literacy crisis are unsupported or rely on a misinterpretation of the relevant data. Third, to allow you to see exactly what I said several years ago. That third point is particularly important, as I have come to believe that the literacy crisis is more complex than I previously understood, and so near the end of this article I’ll be explicitly correcting some of my previous claims. Most of them I still stand by—but there are a few important errors that I need to correct.
In this article, I am going to defend two claims:
- The data about literacy in the United States are being handled irresponsibly. Sometimes this is due to insufficient sourcing; other times it is due to combining statistics from multiple studies and drawing erroneous conclusions.
- There is no single ‘literacy crisis.’ Instead, there are multiple problems facing American culture: early childhood education, adult literacy rates, and sustaining a literate (and literary) culture. Treating these as a single crisis will not allow us to adequately address each problem.
