[Vision2020] America the Illiterate

[Kenneth Marcy]

TruthDig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines: America the Illiterate

By Chris Hedges

We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a 
print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the 
intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which 
constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This 
America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has 
severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot 
differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish 
narratives and clichés. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and 
self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than 
rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split 
the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities. 

There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school 
diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or 
fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or 
barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a 
year. But even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into 
this image-based existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 
percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. 
Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a 
book.

The remainder of this story may be read at:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081110_america_the_illiterate/


Ken