Author Neil Gaiman notes that the prison system is big business. How can they predict jail cell growth? “[U]sing a pretty simple algorithm,” Gaiman said, “based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn’t read.” Not that all illiterate people are criminals or all literate people are not, but the relationship between being unable to read and crime is strong. Sixty percent of America’s prison inmates are illiterate; 85% of all juvenile offenders have reading problems, according to the U.S. Dept. of Education.
Gaiman said he went to China for the first sci-fi convention ever approved by the Communist establishment. He asked an official why this was finally approved. The official replied that the Chinese had no imagination for invention, so they asked the likes of Google, Apple, and others who were inventing new technology. These people were readers of science fiction and fantasy.
“Fiction can show you a different world,” he said. “It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in.”
And Gaiman’s got it percisely backwards. They cannot read because they are criminals. Criminals that did not have the impulse control to avoid getting caught. They lack the impulse control to pay attention in school when it is boring.
Criminals needed to learn character. Something our society has been working hard to twist and denigrate for decades. We are struggling against forces beyond this world. Without an emphasis on Christian character literacy is like a bandaid on an amputation.
We didn’t even read books in high school. They wanted essays and debates, but never writing stories or reading books. If it wasn’t for my own choices, like choosing to read the Grapes of Wrath for my English Final for graduation, I probably wouldn’t be reading now.
The school system doesn’t want kids to read.