Portfolio: Final Exam (frame 1)

---Far too many people, especially children, in the United States are illiterate considering the heavy dependence most of us have on this crucial skill. Geoffrey Meredith writes in his “The Demise of Writing”, “one-fifth of the population is functionally illiterate. A small percentage of these are older people with little formal education. A much larger percentage are youths- high-school and even college graduates, who, despite their degrees, can’t fill out a simple employment form.” Meredith continues to say, “From our current perspective this seems strange. Yet we are fooled by thinking that our time represents the way things always were and always will be. When it comes to reading, today’s 80% literacy rate is an anomaly, the result of dramatically higher education levels.” He seems to be saying that despite more people being able to do the basics of reading, they often do not know how to read anything other than their textbooks. You can see this illiteracy in public schools, businesses, and even as you walk around a city and see the homeless. However, it is not a problem that is unfixable. If parents, or even the government, would be willing to set limits on their children’s consumption of television shows and computer forums, we could easily start seeing large jumps in their abilities to read.
---I have seen this illiteracy at my high-school, and I have to say that it makes me sad. Whenever the teacher would assign some sort of reading assignment, the same five students would come back the next day complaining of it being “too long” or “too hard to understand”. Now, it could be that they could in fact read, or that they were just not motivated to. However, is having the ability to do something yet refusing to act on it not the same as not having the ability? I say that it is. Another question that comes to mind is whether or not their unwillingness to read comes from them having easier and more readily available means of entertainment. Why should they read a book, something that requires them to create their own mental images, when they can just turn on the television and have all of the visual elements already created for them? Television is an excellent medium for receiving news and some entertainment, but it should not be your only source of entertainment, as it does not stimulate the brain nearly as much as reading or writing. It has been proven that reading stimulates brain activity to a far greater extent than watching television, so the idea of having a society that takes reading and writing for granted in exchange for the easy and effortless act of watching television seems like an excellent example of a society that does not ever have any technological, social, or economic advances. Reading stimulates the creative centers in the brain, and by training those centers of the brain, one can become more creative. Since TV does not train this center of the brain as much, I don’t think it would be a stretch to assume that taking away reading, or even decreasing peoples desire to read, would seriously hurt the innovative nature of the United States, if not the world as a whole.
---It is not too late to stop this downward spiral our society seems to be facing however. There are several ways that we can convince our children that reading is a better alternative to sitting on the couch watching TV. One way has already been tested, though in my opinion it was poorly put into practice, and that is the national government stepping to put in a much higher emphasis on teaching students to read in public school. They could create and maintain quality institutions that are there specifically to help children who can’t afford more expensive tutoring programs to learn to read, and have some sort of reading requirement for students to graduate high-school. A more local level of help that is available for students struggling to read is their parents. Who else has the authority to limit the child’s intake of TV? If the parents were to put into effect some sort of limit, say 2 hours of TV a day, or some sort of bargain, 30 minutes of TV for every hour of reading, I am willing to bet that we would see significant increases to America’s population's literacy rates.
---Without the ability to read, much of our ability to communicate over expanses is lost. I am not talking about expanses in the sense of miles, instead expanses in the sense of time. How much would we know of the Ancient Egyptians had not developed a system of writing? Would we have a bible for the most popular religion in the world if we could not read? So much of our identity as citizens of the United States, and indeed our identity as modern human beings, is based on our ability to convey accurate information to those who will later need it. So, how can we ignore this problem of lowering literacy in the United States? In short, we can’t. We have to do something about it now, or it will harm us in the end.