Harry Potter, James Patterson and Oprah Winfrey’s book club aside, Americans ”” particularly young Americans ”” appear to be reading less for fun, and as that happens, their reading test scores are declining. At the same time, performance in other academic disciplines like math and science is dipping for students whose access to books is limited, and employers are rating workers deficient in basic writing skills.
That is the message of a new report being released today by the National Endowment for the Arts, based on an analysis of data from about two dozen studies from the federal Education and Labor Departments and the Census Bureau as well as other academic, foundation and business surveys. After its 2004 report, “Reading at Risk,” which found that fewer than half of Americans over 18 read novels, short stories, plays or poetry, the endowment sought to collect more comprehensive data to build a picture of the role of all reading, including nonfiction.
In his preface to the new 99-page report Dana Gioia, chairman of the endowment, described the data as “simple, consistent and alarming.”
This is so true. I’ve lately read some specifications, written by degreed and experienced engineers, that would not even parse into English, much less provide a basis for establishing scope of work. The state of American English is, in a nutshell, dreadful.
Mom? Dad? Turn off the Playstation, the DirecTV and the PC. Put Junior and Muffy behind a book, for heaven’s sake. My oldest son has read [url=http://www.mcpl.lib.mo.us/readers/awards/juv/mt-nom.htm]all 20 Mark Twain Award nominees[/url] this year and has enjoyed all of them. There are good books out there…all you have to do is pick them up.
The state of American English is, in a nutshell, dreadful.
At the newspaper, we get things from teachers that have to be grammatically reconstructed. Some people don’t want to know the “rules” of the language – it’s that “rule” thing again – but I don’t think they realize what they’re losing: the ability to communicate in any meaningful way.
#2, my wife is a teacher and I see flyers, lessons, letters come home from teachers and principals with glaring grammar and syntax errors. I honestly think I’d weep with joy to see one of my children come home with a sentence-diagramming assignment. Alas, today it’s all creative writing and “language arts,” as if education is a process of getting something out of them instead of putting something in.