…it’s an automatic response, in virtually all humans, to think that things are getting worse. Medieval peasants lamented how good the Cro-Magnons had it; people in the Renaissance looked back on the Dark Ages with great fondness. This is a harmless enough reflex—lazy and uncritical, sure, but usually harmless enough. But when it concerns how we see young people, and how we perceive the landscape of learning and literacy, this kind of doomsaying is a goddamned dangerous kind of intellectual sloth. When we assume, as most adults do, that kids are less literate, less interested in books, than ever before, it involves a willful kind of ignorance, and it imperils how we educate young people. Few if any of these dire assumptions—that no one under 18 reads, that all books will be obsolete by 2020—are borne out by any proof whatsoever. The truth is that American publishers put out 411,000 individual titles last year, an all-time record, and netted $25 billion—hardly a sagging industry. And those kids who have abandoned books for electronic media? Since 2002, juvenile book sales have shown compound annual growth of 4.6 percent for hardcover books and 2.1 percent for paperbacks. Dave Eggers ☀
Tuesday 30 September 2008
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