So 17.8 million adults in great Britain (pop 60.5m) are so illiterate they can’t manage to read the lyrics to Robbie Williams’ Angels or Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now. That’s getting on for half the adult population.
I would guess that the figures for the US are even more dire.
This isn’t just dreadful news for the makers of karaoke machines (and obviously has terrible implications for those of us who rely on widespread functional literacy for our ultimate income).
More than these things, it’s an appalling indictment of the way our society is sleepwalking into vegetative idiocy.
At the dawn of the 20th century, there was a movement amongst working people to better themselves through learning. Foundations such as the Workers’ Educational Association were established. “The Harmsworth Self-Educatorâ€, a magazine series published in forty eight issues between 1905 and 1907, became a huge commercial success. The public’s yearning for knowledge was unquenchable.
A hundred years later, all has changed. Compulsory schooling is ubiquitous (beware the truancy patrols) yet learning has never been so widely held in such contempt. Becks has never read a book, and George Orwell was some geezer on Big Brother, wasn’t he?
All this is intentional. We are being farmed like cattle by the companies that increasingly run our lives, and cattle (originally chattel - property) don’t need to read.
They just need to consume.
