Is Literacy Doomed?

The latest CEMETERY DANCE (No. 59) contains an interview with distinguished British horror anthologist Stephen Jones. He views with alarm the state of literacy in general and the condition of mass market horror fiction (while remaining hopeful about the future of the genre, the demise of which has been predicted many times in the past). He says, “Most kids are leaving school sub-literate,” and, “Almost nobody reads these days.” He mourns the passing of the time when we used to “get our information from words.” He doesn’t count the information (and fiction) readers find on the Internet as worthy of notice. (While many newspapers and websites are part of the “dumbing down” process, as he says, surely not ALL are?) Jones considers blogs and personal websites a waste of an author’s time and lumps together all e-published and POD books with unedited, shoddily produced self-published releases.

Coincidentally, Thomas Monteleone’s column in the same issue laments declining standards of literacy among would-be writers, as demonstrated by the low quality of slush pile submissions. He points out an alarming frequency of misspellings that make it evident the writers are trying to write words they have never seen in print. In other words, even many aspiring authors aren’t necessarily readers—and I agree that trend IS alarming, if true. As Garrison Keillor says in today’s column, “Writing is an act of paying attention.” Disdain for the niceties of spelling, punctuation, and usage implies a distressing lack of care for one’s own work as well as the material one reads. Monteleone connects this plight with what he considers the disastrous state of education and general cultural literacy.

My overall reaction to the two CEMETERY DANCE articles is along the line of, “Calm down, get a grip, it’s not THAT bad.” Viewers-with-alarm seem to forget how novel the ideal of universal literacy is. In the “good old days” when people supposedly read lots of books and were well acquainted with literature and history, those who attended high school, let alone graduated, were in the minority. Even in my youth (when dinosaurs roamed the Earth) I suspect the “bad” kids were either expelled long before graduation or at least not discouraged from dropping out. Nowadays, schools pursue the goal of having all students complete a secondary education. So of course the average gets pulled down, now that high school students represent the entire population rather than a select group (the group those people nostalgic for the good old days are actually thinking of when they compare yesterday's level of public education with today's). Meanwhile, a college degree has become the entry-level employment qualification that a high school diploma used to be. So of course everybody is urged to go to college, even if not well prepared, because they may find themselves jobless otherwise.

As Isaac Asimov pointed out in one of his essays, people who voluntarily read for pleasure have always been a minority. Only the competing leisure activities have changed. As for the legitimate causes for alarm that do exist, in my opinion it doesn’t help a bit to dismiss wholesale all instances of new formats, e.g. e-publishing and POD, as substandard and inauthentic. Does anyone seriously believe the comparatively few books for which mass market publishers have room on their lists exhaust the number of good submissions they’ve received? Small presses and other alternative publication venues give those worthy-but-rejected books a chance to find a home. The widening and varying of the fiction delivery system, to me, is something to be celebrated. Yes, Sturgeon’s Law holds true; 90 percent of everything is junk, and maybe the ease of online publication makes the 90 percent more visible. The other 10 percent, however, should have fresh opportunities find its audience in this “brave new world” reading environment.