One of my favorite Slope readers sent me this fascinating article about the "Two Americas" – literate and not – here's a snippet:
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.
