Quote:
Originally Posted by patrickt
I went to Google to find out how many people in the U.S. actually read books. There was such a wide range of responses that the answer seems to be that no one knows. The problem is that all the statistics come from self-reporting. Most people are reluctant to say, "I haven't read a book in twenty years."
Just my opinion based on friends, people at work, and my observations is that less than 15% read regularly.
I also had occasion to test the employees where I worked for reading proficiency. All were high school graduates, some had been to college, and a few had college degrees. Twenty-five percent of the employees were functionally illiterate.
The sad thing is that after a series of reading improvement classes, all of the employees who took the classes moved up into functionally literate and even the ones who read well before the class were reading better. That means the students were stupid. Our school system had simply failed to teach them to read with proficiency. Two of the men were identified to have severe dyslexia and both had granduated from high school with no one noticing they couldn't read.
A reporter asked me once what I thought of sex eduction classes in junior high. I said it was a great idea because if the schools taught sex the way the teach reading adolescents wouldn't want to do it.
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When I was in college I heard a teacher bemoaning the fact of how bad his students reading comprehension was. I asked him if that wasn't something people were supposed to learn in grade school. He replied that that was his point. Mind I was in college some 20 yrs or so ago. Sad that it doesn't seem to have gotten any better.