A researcher at the University of Wisconsin has come up with a new way to compare US cities - literacy rates. Kay McSpadden reports in the Charlotte Observer on how Dr. Jack Miller compiled his statistics, and has a few observations about other factors related to literacy:
Dr. Jack Miller, chancellor and education professor, recently compiled the statistics from the 64 largest U.S. cities. He looked at the number of booksellers per capita, library support, newspaper circulation, the number of locally published periodicals, and the education level of the population to measure the overall literacy of the cities...
In all categories, the top 10 cities of various sizes were spread across the country, though more of the Sun Belt cities were represented in the bottom 10 cities, perhaps, the researchers speculate, because they have larger, poorer immigrant populations...
...the list raises interesting questions. If Charlotte's population is so well educated, why aren't we reading more? If we have such a large percentage of educated adults, why is it easier to find a bookstore in Atlanta than in Charlotte? Why do children in Miami have more library services than our kids do? Why aren't more people here reading the newspaper, and why haven't we been able to generate more local magazines? Some of those questions are best answered by the leaders who allocate funding for libraries or who encourage businesses such as booksellers and publishers...
Me, I wonder how Dr. Miller is accounting for the prevalence of the internet. I buy almost all my books off of Amazon (or my generous readers send them to me, thank you very much), I read almost all my news online (I get only the Sunday edition of the Inquirer), and I buy many fewer periodicals than I used to, almost none of them local. I suppose that, for now, a literate city is going to have more bookstores and more local periodicals than a non-literate city, but in the future, that may change, and it may not be possible to measure literacy by examining only non-web-related variables...
Posted by kswygert at July 22, 2003 11:39 AM