While conducting research for The Write Design Company business plan, I ran across the following article in Teen Ink titled The Plague of Illiteracy, and it broke my heart.
“As a culture, we have begun to value education less, even as countries around us begin to grow at a pace that was before incomprehensible. China currently has a literacy rate of over ninety percent, while the United States has an average literacy rate of eighty-seven percent. After leaving school, many Americans never pick up a book again. They simply do not read.”
“That is not to say that intelligence is lacking. Many of the students are brilliant, but have never taken the opportunity to advance. More than half of the seniors in my graduating class do not plan to attend college, or even leave our valley. Despite the fact that we are not secluded from the world, many adults have never gone twenty miles beyond our town. They do not read, and they do not try to gain any knowledge after high school. They are functionally illiterate…”
How do you feel about the decline in literacy rates in America?