Reflections on Reading After Graduation

Intro: Although I attended a graduation ceremony just the other week, I teach year-round and so have almost forgotten that most people are off of school at this time. Most of you are (I hope) inveterate readers. This week, I want to explore what and how people read during and after school, each year and after one has completed one's formal education, with some ideas from my experience on what to read. This post is from a United States perspective, and I welcome readers' international perspectives!

What's My Story?

Like Husband, I enjoyed the academic stimulation of school, so much that I kept going to school until last year. After high school, I completed an associate's in science, then a bachelor's in biology. At that point, I couldn't decide between a master's in biology and a doctor of physical therapy (DPT), so I went with the DPT for several reasons that turned out quite well. After earning the DPT, I worked in the clinic for several years before starting a part-time PhD program that I completed a few months after Child was born. Through it all, I was reading.

Education and Reading

After high school and the associate's degree, I focused my reading on textbooks, mostly required and some recommended. Although I had read quite a few novels and miscellaneous leisure-time books through high school, the time I had for this went down somewhat when full-time classes were in session. This memory may be slightly inaccurate because I wasn't documenting my TBR list completion at that time (and of course, Book It! during summers was a big incentive!).

Once I started the DPT program, I distinctly remember reading both Anna Karenina and War and Peace in full during year 1 of the program, which was immensely satisfying (and probably meant that I could have worked more hours without adverse effect on grades). Following graduation, I had no more textbooks to read, but still wanted to read and keep up knowledge. This ended up consisting mostly of journal articles, semi-systematically gathered via subscriptions to journals' tables of contents and a curated science article subscription service (Amedeo).

For the years between DPT and PhD, I read quite a few books in my leisure time that trended toward the informative. During the PhD program, there were both textbooks and inches of printed articles, a few of which I still have in a binder. This meant a lot of 4:30 mornings! After the PhD, I have been trying to get back into varied reading. It trends toward nonfiction, theology, philosophy, and education-related material. A couple of novels are in progress (and I'm happy to have finally knocked out and understood the Space Trilogy!), but that depends on the time of school year.

Blogging Topics

If you look back in the archives of this blog, The Renaissance Biologist was born on October 14, 2007, once I was in community college. The first few years of topics included lots of news article commentary about biology, sermon notes, (il)logic, typical young-Republican snark from which I have long distanced myself. I had too much time on my hands, so was putting out multiple short posts each day, linking to a news article of interest.

Once in university, I transitioned to a slightly lower posting frequency of chapter-by-chapter commentaries on books I was reading for class or apologetics interest, and of course more sermon notes. The blog went silent for the first half of the DPT program, due to me burying myself in classwork. Thereafter, I returned to book commentary and sermon notes.

After this brief resurrection, the blog hibernated again for almost 3 years. Finally, in 2019, I had half a mind to resurrect the blog and refocus it on what I had always loved, reading and writing about reading. In late 2022, I took Lisa Bass's Create Your Blog Dream course (affiliate link also in the sidebar) and started blogging regularly again, more thoughtfully this time with best practices. I haven't had the inner impetus to migrate to Wordpress yet, but that may be coming soon.

I covet your feedback on the blogging content and style, since I've been working on improving the best practices one by one. According to this article, the only reason I see for a potential reader not finishing a post of mine is the long sentences. Oops...especially since Strunk and White has been one of my long-time favorites which I do try to put into practice.

Reading During School

Now that you know a little more about my background, let's explore what happens at the population level regarding in-school reading.

How Reading is Taught

I'd like to start with a slightly different question: how reading was taught, specifically in the ancient world around the time of the earliest days of Christianity. In this vein, I can't get very far without citing N. T. Wright (this time from Paul: A Biography, pp. 425-426):

"In the same way, education in the ancient world was almost entirely for the elite. Jewish boys were taught to read and write; they would, after all, need to study the Torah. But a great many ordinary pagans were either functionally illiterate or able only to read what was required for daily tasks. Some estimates put the level of literacy at between 20 and 30 percent; some of the older Greek cities and islands had a tradition of elementary education for citizens, but for many people, again especially for women and slaves, this would have been minimal. The early Christians, however, were enthusiastic about education, and particularly reading. When we ask ourselves what the 'teachers' in Paul's communities were teaching, I suspect that part of the answer was 'reading,' since if they were teaching the converts (as they surely were) the scriptures of ancient Israel, this would have involved basic skills that many of those converts had hitherto lacked."

Stop and re-read that quote. Christianity was revolutionary in a number of ways, but the connection of evangelism to reading instruction was a new one for me. I won't get to the Pauline epistles for a few months at the rate I'm going, but now there's yet another facet to look forward to.

Now, let's return to the present-day United States. You don't need to look far for sad data about the state of literacy in this country. I'll look at that in the next section, but right now I think it's important to examine how reading is being taught (here's my source article). Standardized testing occurs at certain grade levels in public schools; recent data indicate that a minority (< 50%) of 4th graders are "proficient" readers. 

How is reading taught? Starting in kindergarten or thereabouts, the most common method is 3-cue. This involves the child guessing a new word by context in the text, any associated pictures, and potentially the apparent pronunciation. This method downplays the role of phonics--but research keeps coming back to supporting phonics, so hopefully the tide will start to turn toward phonics-congruent practices. Despite the noted irregularities of the English language, pronunciation on the whole falls into definite patterns, teachable by phonics. I learned something new about phonics: that phonemic awareness isn't the same as letter/sound correspondence.

What Children (Don't) Read in School

I wasn't able to find a source indicating a single set of books that most school-age children in the United States read, but there are definitely articles on why they stop reading.

• They're not read aloud to past kindergarten--interesting stories are not accessible to them in most school settings
• Standardized testing requires analysis that might otherwise happen spontaneously; Charlotte Mason had plenty of thoughts about this approach even before it became popular
• Higher grades in school include over-scheduling and less time for leisure reading/listening
• Good-quality, interesting juvenile fiction, a staple of classical and Charlotte Mason curricula, is absent in high schools
• Parents as a corpus don't model reading for pleasure

What (College) Adults Read in School

Mostly textbooks . . . if they actually do the readings. My university department moved to a blended curricular delivery format several years ago--which, incidentally, positioned it well when COVID hit--to incentivize students to come prepared to class. Currently, health professions students in the department complete pre-work ("entrance tickets") including watching pre-recorded lectures and completing assignments based on the readings, in-class discussion that assumes basic exposure to the content, and post-class work at a higher level of challenge.

Reading After School

Since reading levels, both amount and proficiency, are low during school years despite educators' best intentions, it isn't surprising that the downward trend continues after one graduates.

Leisure

One purported cause of the decline of reading for fun is the universal availability of electronic media (TV) and, introduced after TV, the Internet. Although higher education levels are positively associated with prevalence of literary reading, more people being college educated still do not read when they're not required to. Literary fiction increases empathy in readers, which prompts some curiosity in researchers to see whether this association is causative or not. Potential cognitive impacts of decreased reading at a population level include decreased IQ, but, interestingly, there is an inverted U-shaped association of IQ with creativity, with the peak of creativity around 120 (dropping off both below and above that number).

What, and how much, do adults in the US actually read, then (sources: Statista and the Pew Research Center)? They do still read books, both in print and digital. Rather than newspapers, social media is their main source for news. It is encouraging that 75% or so of adult read at least 1 book per year, which translates to about 20 minutes of reading "something" per day. The "typical" adult who doesn't read books regularly has less than a college education, a household income at or below $30,000, is over 50 years old, and has never been to a library.

Work

Certain jobs require more or less reading as a part of the work day. Here's a 2021 breakdown of types of jobs and the numbers/percentages of people who hold them from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. What stands out to me as the jobs that would require the most book reading include:

• Top executives and legislators (barring the "we need to pass it to find out what's in it" mentality!), 2.2% or 3.4 million
• Education administrators, 0.4% or 638,000
• Computer occupations, 3% or 4.7 million
• Scientists, 0.9% or 1.4 million
• Clergy, 0.2% or 245,000
• Teachers/librarians, 5.8% or 9.2 million

Jobs that would apparently require the least book reading include:

• Art/design-related occupations, 1.8% or 2.8 million
• Healthcare support occupations, 4.4% or 7 million
• Food-related occupations, 7.4% or 11.8 million

With that background, what are the literacy rates in adults today? In the US (2019 data from the National Center for Education Statistics), the working definition of literacy is “the ability to understand, evaluate, use and engage with written texts to participate in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential” (p. 61, OECD 2013). Level 2 literacy, which matches the everyday needs of most people, requires readers to compare, contrast, and make low-level inferences such as mentally filling in a missing adjective based on context. About 80% of adults do have at least this level of literacy; adults who had less include those with cognitive deficits precluding participation in the survey, those who were white or Hispanic, and non-US-born adults. 

Worldwide (Our World In Statistics data), literacy rates are comparable. This site doesn't give a working current definition of literacy, but notes that a common estimate of past literacy (before standardized tests) was the ability to write one's name on legal and other documents, and numeracy was the ability to state one's age correctly in years. Currently, the global literacy rate is 84% and has increased by roughly 4% in recent years. This global rate is much higher than in the 1800s, when the recent Enlightenment had marked a turning point in prioritizing literacy for all people. Poorer countries tend to have lower literacy rates, and younger people are more likely to be literate, potentially due to access to regularly scheduled education.

What is your take on literacy? Do you have a background in a typical or atypical educational system that affected your views as well as your personal literacy? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments!