Literacy and Reading: The Path Least Trodden
There are, we are told, more books being published and bought than at any other time in modern history. A positive flood of new works appear throughout the world practically every day, and the competitive literary marketplace has become a fighting ground, vital with literary supremacy as much as with an every increasing amount of low-grade slop from Artificial Intelligence compilers. On the one side this is to be greeted, while on the other the question arises over who exactly is writing and buying all these new works? The answer to the first part of this question is simple: there is a wealth of talent either entering or already within a marketplace teeming with talent, and with subject matter which seems to know no end. The second part is considerably harder to answer: education and educational standards are slipping, barrelling towards a level where it might be claimed illiteracy holds the stronger hand. Funding for education as well as restrictions on the curriculum and accessibility to education has been suppressed massively over the last few years, with cutbacks to funding where no further restrictions can be afforded, and investment in private education, where only the few can step up with the necessary finances, and the remainder must pledge their lives to long-term debt.
The Liberal Arts in general are suffering from a lack of financial attention from governments around the world. With the decision to close down entire ministries or major departments allied and supportive of the various arts, and indeed education itself, governments are doing themselves, their countries and their youth no service whatsoever. Education has been aimed at creating a working class destined to provide the capitalist and commercial sectors with a workforce, rather than educating and bringing out the best in each individual, according to their own abilities, to the benefit of society. The cutbacks in education across Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States of America – and especially the latter, with its massive ideological restrictions on what is suitable for anyone of any age to read – are producing a generation incapable of reading anything but the most simple of instructions, and losing the imagination to attempt classics and works of a higher literary worth.
The worst violation of the cultural human right to reading is the global tragedy of illiteracy. Absolute, secondary, and functional illiteracy has become a looming threat in today’s world, where printed materials are produced, disseminated, and read more than at any time since the invention of printing. It is a cause of worldwide concern that can oppress us like a nightmare.
Klaus Höpcke (1933 – 2023) in “Lesen als kulturelles Mensenrecht,” 1989.
Admittedly it is not just a lack of government funding for education and the arts which is at fault. The fast and, for some, welcome advances in technology, the access to information from anywhere at any time has exacerbated the problem. Information must be short and to the point. The reader must be able to understand what they are being presented with quickly, regardless of their level of education, and move on to the next subject. The idea of tackling a book with more than two or three hundred pages is the stuff of nightmares. Reading a news or informational article in a periodical, or even online, that takes up more than three or four minutes of a person’s time is asking too much. The love of literature, of reading in general, is being dumbed down by the cutting back of educational resources, of the ability for people to focus on lengthier pieces, or appreciate more complex plot lines and connections within a literary setting, by the very technological advances which should be bringing literature and the joy of reading to everyone.
It is highly unlikely that our society, based and reliant on advanced communicative technology, will ever revert completely to the better times of personal communication and learning, and perhaps that is not necessary. What is necessary, though, is a continuance of funding for the arts, for literature, and especially for education, so that we do not become a society of people – perhaps divided across the generations – incapable of reading anything beyond the most simple fairy stories, stumbling over shopping lists and directions, without an appreciation for the finer things in life. Access to the arts and to literature, to reading and participating should, as Höpcke writes, be a cultural human right, supported by the government as much as my individual institutions, a way of bringing people back together, and dispelling the cultural and personal loneliness many claim as their own.
