Member-only story
“Reading is for Losers!”: The American Trend of Intentional Illiteracy
“I can’t be expected to read!”
“It’s not my job to read!”
Ah, the screeches of angry/humiliated customers who ignored the giant signs warning them that there is no cashback/the ice cream machine is down/the floor is wet. In my (relatively short) time in retail, I heard this attitude expressed a lot. In a bizarre phenomenon that is known as Customer’s Retail Adjusted Perception, or CRAP, customers appear to lose their normal ability to read and otherwise process information in their surroundings, then respond with aggression or hysterics when their expectations are not met. Yet this phenomenon’s key symptom, the inability/refusal to read signage communicating important information, speaks to a larger problem in American society: the active refusal to read.
The United States has a literacy problem. Literally millions of citizens cannot read, or their reading level doesn’t meet the level expected for their age. Ten years ago, it was 32 million, and that number had only worsened from where it was ten years before that. This is a failure of the U.S. education system that also imports clear racial and socioeconomic bias. A 2003 study from the National Center for Education Statistics reported that of those who scored “Below Basic Literacy” in assessments, 20 percent were black and…
