Loss of proficiency

The National Center for Education Statistics has just released a report on its 2003 survey of adult literacy in America. I’ve been eagerly awaiting it, to see if it would confirm or deny my quasi-apocalyptic anxieties about reading in America. Like the NEA’s 2004 report Reading at Risk, the National Center for Education Statistics’s National Assessment of Adult Literacy gives hard numbers to changes that have taken place in American reading in the last decade. But whereas the NEA was concerned with the reading of literature, the NCES focuses on the skills that go into reading, broadly defined.

The good news is that everyone seems to have gotten better with numbers, or what the NCES calls “quantitative literacy.” And the average scores on “prose literacy” (aka literacy classic—the ability to read a paragraph, understand it, and take issue with it if necessary) and “document literacy” (the ability to interpret maps, prescription labels, and the sides of cereal boxes) have held steady overall. It was therefore my first impression that perhaps I could file my reading anxieties under Apocalypses That Didn’t Arrive, and turn my attention elsewhere, like, say, our Netflix queue, which really needs it.

On closer inspection, however, the statistics are not quite so encouraging. To see why, you need to go a bit further into the report, A First Look at the Literacy of America’s Adults in the 21st Century. In figure 2, on page 4, take a look at the change between 1992 and 2003 in the percentage-point breakdown of proficient, intermediate, basic, and below-basic readers.

You’ll notice that the proficient readers of prose have declined from 15% in 1992 to 13% in 2003, and that this result gets an asterisk, because the difference is statistically significant. Something similar happened with document literacy. And quantitative literacy improved overall not because of any increase in the number of people proficient with numbers, but because the number of people below a basic level declined.

Everyone should be as literate as possible in every way, of course. But it’s proficiency in prose literacy that keeps me up nights. That’s the group likely to subscribe to newspapers and to buy books. It’s also the one crucial to a functioning democracy. To explain their division of literacy into three types and four levels, the NCES writers list real-world tasks for each of the twelve type-level combinations. An example of successful basic document literacy: using the TV guide. An example of successful below-basic quantitative literacy: adding up items on a deposit slip at the bank. An example of successful proficient prose literacy: “comparing viewpoints in two editorials.” The share of Americans who can do that has gone down over the past decade, from 15% to 13%. That’s not a good sign. In a mature, industrial democracy, it’s a very peculiar sign. We’re not talking about how much reading Americans do. We’re talking about how many Americans are capable of it. I don’t think you can pin the shift on immigration; whites and Hispanics lost ground, blacks held steady, but Asian and Pacific Islanders gained proficient prose readers.

OK, two more observations, and then I have to go to bed. Page 14 has a real zinger: “Average prose literacy decreased for all levels of education attainment between 1992 and 2003.” Only 40% of college graduates were proficient readers of prose in 1992; only 31% were in 2003. Happily, the number of Americans with college degrees rose by two percentage points in the same period.

And then, finally, you’re wondering why proficient readers of prose are on the decline. The answer is in figure 17, on page 16.

What this chart shows is that it’s still hard to get a job if you have basic or below-basic literacy skills. But it’s not as hard as it once was. In the two sets of columns on the left, for “below basic” and “basic,” the movement is upward, toward employment. On the right, by contrast, those with intermediate or proficient levels of prose literacy have actually slumped down slightly, into unemployment and non-employment. In 1992, a proficient reader was more than twice as likely to have a full-time job as a below-basic reader. In 2003, he was less than twice as likely. In other words, the American labor market rewards literacy less aggressively than it once did.

Jake, Heath, and the real McCoy

For those unable to wait until the Friday release of Brokeback Mountain, here’s a photo from roughly a century ago of cowboys dancing together: Erwin E. Smith, “Dancing, seemingly not hampered by lack of women, 1908-1912,” Amon Carter Museum Not quite as racy as the upcoming movie, I’m afraid, and in terms of what the photo means, your mileage may vary. (Research credit: I first came across the photo in D. Michael Quinn’s Same-Sex Dynamics among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example [University of Illinois, 1996].)

Happy Thanksgiving; there’s no more oil

As Michael T. Klare explained in “More Blood, Less Oil” (not online) in the current issue of n+1, the geologist M. King Hubbert noticed in the 1950s that an oil well’s rate of production rises and falls in a bell-shaped curve. Thus the sum product of any group of oil wells must also rise and fall in this shape. Reading the data available in 1956, Hubbert guessed that the U.S. production of oil would peak in the early 1970s. He proved to be right.

When will the the entire world’s production of oil peak? There’s no doubt that it will. Klare reports that the Department of Energy estimates the middle of this century but the Princeton geologist Kenneth S. Deffeyes thinks that “The peak will occur in late 2005 or in the first few months of 2006.” In fact, as a post on Mitch Gould’s blog advises, Deffeyes not long ago issued an even more specific date: Thanksgiving 2005.

Deffeyes, who worked with Hubbert at Shell, freely admits that “it is a bit silly” of him to have chosen such a precise date, and no doubt he’s done it to draw a bit of attention to his point, which does not depend on such details. It is, however, sobering to realize that on a day not far from tomorrow, if not tomorrow specfiically, we will have taken as much oil out of the ground as still remains below it, and that the future flow of it will dwindle.

Next of Kin

On 12 May 2005, hurriedly and to the dismay of many art lovers, the New York Public Library sold Asher B. Durand’s famous 1849 painting Kindred Spirits in a closed-bid auction. It was bought by a Wal-Mart heiress, who’s taking it to a private museum in the Arkansas town where Wal-Mart has its headquarters. Earlier this week in the Wall Street Journal, Lee Rosenbaum reported new details of the library’s decision-making and called the sale “A Betrayal of Trust.”

At Sotheby’s on 30 November 2005, the library will sell off another chunk of its artistic patrimony. (HTML note: To browse through the catalogue online, you have to register with Sotheby’s, but registration is free.) In this batch, John Singleton Copley’s portrait of Mrs. Theodore Atkinson and her pet squirrel is the one I’ll miss the most.

By coincidence, a new article by H. Daniel Peck in the winter 2005 issue of American Literary History takes a close look at Durand, and Kindred Spirits in particular. (HTML note: The article isn’t freely available but most university libraries will have access to it.) Peck preserves a scholarly neutrality on the controversy surrounding the auction, but several details in his article bring home what New York has lost. He calls it “perhaps the most iconic of all American landscape paintings” and points out that it has graced the cover of the Norton Anthology of American Literature since 1979. Peck sees in the painting analogies to the “romantic empiricism” of Thoreau and an allegory of Durand’s own development as an artist, in particular, his relationship to the more celebrated painter Thomas Cole. Peck suggests that in Kindred Spirits the poet William Cullen Bryant is a surrogate for Durand:

In this picture, Cole takes a tutorial stance toward the other figure [Bryant], looking down at him from an elevated portion of the promontory and pointing out the lessons he has learned from the Book of Nature. The other figure, however, may or may not be listening. He’s not returning Cole’s instructive gaze but instead looking across the stream at a Durand-like rock formation, from which he may have learned very different lessons (p. 703).

Peck’s endnotes remind one that the New York Public Library holds Durand’s manucript papers—another reason the painting belonged at that institution. They also reveal that in 2007 the Brooklyn Museum of Art will mount the first major exhibition of Durand’s work in recent memory. Indeed, some of the most intriguing observations in Peck’s article are those relating Kindred Spirits to earlier sketches by Durand, in oil and graphite, several of which he reproduces. New York has lost Kindred Spirits just as Durand is finally coming into his own. The 2007 Brooklyn exhibit will be bittersweet.