Sound the Alarm...Joyfully!

Image by freepik

By Mark W.F. Condon, Unite for Literacy vice president

Nearly one quarter of people in the U.S. have never learned to read. According to the National Literacy Institute, in 2024, 21% of U.S. adults were illiterate and 54% of adults had a literacy below a 6th-grade level.

It’s true and sad that some people never become “good” readers with the intrinsic motivation to comfortably sit back and enjoy a self-selected book. Instead, they struggle to navigate the print materials necessary to conduct business and personal affairs. What’s sadder is that most comfortable readers probably don’t find this particularly alarming.

Given the educational and library resources in communities throughout the nation, and with few obvious exceptions for those with significant handicaps, there really is no excuse for anyone not to become quite good at reading for their own enjoyment and personal business, if they really want to.

Consider these three tenets of reading:

First, reading mostly is a very private activity and largely occurs outside of a school context, so there is no social pressure to learn to read at any particular rate or to any assigned level of performance.

Second, there is no age restriction to learning to read. Those as young as 3 and as old as 93 can learn to read. Within a relatively short time frame, developing readers can find joy in reading books of their personal choice.

Third, because they’re not in school, older literacy learners never need to feel rushed in making their way to comfortable, productive literacy. They are never told what materials they must read, and they aren’t required to sit and work in such materials with their literacy development or age-level counterparts. They are free to ask questions of accomplished readers they trust (e.g., family, friends, neighbors, librarians), talk about their progress, share their most recent challenges, and take any number of breaks, for hours or days. They are in it for themselves and thus may take joy in the journey without much concern for meeting some arbitrary (typically school) deadline.

So, if we get every developing reader a library card and help them find books that spark their interests, fund libraries at appropriate levels to meet what would surely be heightened demand for a broadening range of books, hire plenty of librarians, and challenge every reader of any age to lovingly support every non-reader who asks for help, what might be possible?

We submit that if we each got involved with developing readers in ways that we and they can feel good about, it could make a significant difference in the gentle development of non-readers becoming eager new readers.

This isn’t magic. It is simply adding loving support for those who may have spent their days in school grouped with other frustrated readers. If we honor each and all of their experiences and interests by inviting them into a warm supportive community of like-minded readers, we suspect that they would be drawn to books in wonderfully exciting ways.