Hi! This article from the "Washington Post," by Thomas Washington, was reprinted in our local newspaper today. Among pertinent quotes that caught my eye:
"I presumed that librarians were mostly united in their attraction to books. But as I moved along in my library science program, I found that books weren't really our focus. Information management, database networking, and research tools claimed the largest share of the curriculum. In other words, literacy today is defined less by how English departments or a librarian might teach Wordsworth or Faulkner than by how we find our way through the digital forest of information overload." "Conventional wisdom has it that teenagers don't read because they're too busy. Only after high school, sometime midway through college, do young adults reconnect with their childhood love of reading and make books their partners for life. I don't think so anymore. The 2004 Reading at Risk report by the National Endowment for the Arts concluded that literary reading was in serious decline on all fronts, especially among the youngest adults, ages 18-24, whose rate of decrease was 55 percent greater than that of the total adult population." As I would ask my Humanities 7 students, "Reactions?" Full text at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/19/AR2007011901361.html Take care, Bill Ivey Stoneleigh-Burnham School _______________________________________________ The Literacy Workshop ListServ http://www.literacyworkshop.org To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/lit_literacyworkshop.org. Search the LIT archives at http://snipurl.com/LITArchive
