We are fortunate to live in a town with a beautiful public library. When these little girls’ mama was little, we went to the library every week, first for story time and then to swap out the week’s library books. This is no longer a routine in many families. Recent data suggests that American adults now visit the library less than once a month and just over half of parents take their kids to libraries. The exciting ritual of getting a library card as soon as you were old enough is almost gone.
People who do use libraries are now more likely to be borrowing e-books or other digital media than physical books, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
But there’s still some excitement in following the signs to your particular desired books.
Libraries are making serious efforts to provide more services and more excitement as audiences dwindle.
And using a library is easier than ever. You don’t need to use a card catalog — it’s all on the computer.
When you’re ready to check out your books, there’s a check out kiosk, not a librarian. Scan your card…
Set your books on the scanner, and everything is taken care of.
But if libraries are the key to literacy, as EveryLibrary.org insists, and literacy is key to solving everything, as the National Literacy Institute says, should we worry about the decline of libraries?
In-person library visits are declining. They bounced bak after the pandemic, but according to the latest figures were still only about halfway back to he 2009 levels by 2003. Maybe they’ve risen significantly in the past couple of years. but we’re seeing a general decline.
The decline of reading
Our guy Gideon teaches 7th grade English. He says that very few of his students can read on grade level and some can’t read at all. He wonders whether that really matters any more. You can get AI tools to summarize and explain things you might otherwise need to read. You can watch movies, explanations of skills on YouTube, and entertainment and news on TikTok. There are apps that will read things to you if you are actually illiterate.
And it isn’t just Gideon’s classroom. The Pew Research Center reports that nearly a quarter of American adults didn’t read even one book in a year. Fortunately, that means that 75% have read at least one book a year. Of those, 38% read one to five books in the year. Only 14% read more than 20 books — and 20 books is just one every couple of weeks.
But that’s adults. The big fourth grade literacy assessment shows that 40% of U.S. fourth graders read below the basic level of literacy. Kids are assigned books to read in school, so they’re reading some things, but The Atlantic reported that only 10% of high school seniors have read more than 6 books from beginning to end. Only 37% of children read every day for fun.
A new book by James Marriott, The New Dark Ages, makes the argument that this is a problem, rather than just an efficient response to changing technologies. “Complex and elaborate forms of knowledge like history, philosophy, and science are not inevitable parts of human culture, ” Marriott writes. “Rather, they depend on literacy. No medium other than writing can contain the same density of argument, the same level of abstraction, or the same intellectual rigor. To lose reading would mean losing the complex and sophisticated kinds of thinking that underwrite our entire civilization.”
Where do you fall on that continuum? Is reading still important?
And what about libraries? Do you use them, and if you so, do you visit in person? Or do you just rely on Kindle Unlimited to keep you in books?
