Reading

Recently I watched a video talking about the literacy crisis. A whole generation of youngsters are growing up with poor literacy skills, whilst adults are increasingly outsourcing their critical thinking skills to Grand Theft Autocomplete (AI). The fact that I learned about this in a video speaks volumes about how we arrived at this point. Video content which is flashy and visually engaging, but light on information will always win over complex but ultimately dry text in a book. As a result, we’ve landed at a point where a substantial number of adults have poor literacy skills and just 1 in 3 children enjoy reading. This is setting us up for disaster as these youngsters enter the workforce lacking the critical thinking skills to get by; without the ability to empathise; and without the broad range of knowledge a well-read person may have. My job requires a lot of reading, a lot of writing, as well as a need to quickly read between the lines to enable me to arrive at a decision or a…