Are we Illiterate?

Chris Hedges’s “America the Illiterate” brings a sinister view onto the table about the way America thinks and reads. He claims that one-third of Americans are illiterate – defining illiterate as not being able to read at all or having such a low reading level that people cannot decipher truth from lies and cannot make good decisions. To Hedges, literacy is having the ability to sift through all the information in order to make informed decisions from picking the right kind of food to picking the next president. Upon reading this view about the American public, my first response was to immediately reject what Hedges was saying or find a hole in his argument to prove him wrong. But, thinking through his argument a second time, I thought I had better come to terms with the fact that a large portion of our country cannot read so that I do not become a part of the problem. First we have to acknowledge the problem, and then the country can work to fix it. However, if the data of campaigning that Hedges discusses is true, where is the motivation to fix it? Campaigns seem to be dumb down for the one-third of the population that cannot determine which information to believe. This scares me that the heads of our country set the bar lower for people to vote rather than raise the bar and bring up level of literacy for the entire country.

Carr and Hedges both concern themselves with how reading affects society as a whole and both claim that intelligence is becoming “artificial.” By artificial, I mean that because of the reading habits people only spew of facts that they read without doing in depth research on them. For Hedges, people believe the slogans and the pictures they see which does not provide much substance for people to make accurate decisions. On the other hand, Carr observes that people do not do in depth research when they have the internet that provides abstracts that summarize the information – this prevents people deciphering the truth as well. So, according to both of these men, the illiterate and the literate do not discover the truth. If this is true, our country is in trouble.