Sunday, January 22, 2012
Illiteracy
A large number of people in the US cannot read at a sufficient level or cannot read at all. These people can survive much of today’s world though because much of our culture is print or picture based. Since this number of people that are illiterate is so high, political campaigns have changed how they campaign to make sure the illiterate have the possibility to follow them. Politicians can get elected by appealing to the illiterate in childish ways and not based off true educated votes. Not only is much of the US illiterate, many high school and college graduates have not read a book after graduation showing that even those that can read, do not. I find it sad that the reading level that presidential debates are written in now is round 6-7th grade. It is scary to think that is the reading level a majority of Americans are at so our political system has to work at a similar level. . Also so much of culture is picture based like Hedge’s described. One can go order food by simply looking at a picture and saying a number. Hedges and Carr both talk about how today’s population is moving away from print material and see this as presenting problems. When looking at it based of Carr’s article, it is does not seem as much of an issue as Hedges presents. Hedges’ sees that since people are not reading and buying print material they are becoming more illiterate. This cannot solely be the issue for illiteracy in the US because he said about 92 million adults are illiterate or semi illiterate. These people would have grown up in a much less internet dependent society so there has to be so other factor that caused for such a large number of illiterate people
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