Part V. The Humanities in American Life Section A. Humanistic Skills and Practices

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Indicator V-1 Adult Literacy

Indicator V-2 Family Literacy

Indicator V-3 Book Reading

Indicator V-4 Creative Writing

Indicator V-5 Multilingualism

Indicator V-6 Adult Continuing Education

The humanities are fundamentally, though not exclusively, about language—as both a means of expression and an object of study. Because humanistic knowledge is preserved and transmitted primarily through written language, literacy is one of the most crucial humanistic competencies. While other sections of the Humanities Indicators considered the skill levels attained by primary and secondary school students, the indicators in this section focus on other national measures of literacy, as well as on some of the reading and writing practices of the general public. The indicators in this section are also concerned with multilingualism and particularly with advanced speakers of foreign languages, who contribute significantly to the nation’s cultural diversity and to the vitality of the humanities in the United States. Although accurate survey data concerning the extent to which Americans pursue interests in literature, language, and other humanistic subjects are difficult to find, some data pertaining to their doing so through continuing education are available and are presented in the final indicator of this section.

Indicator V-1	Adult Literacy
Print V-1 Updated (12/11/09) with data from the Adult Literacy & Lifeskills Survey (ALL). Administered in the US in 2003, ALL is the successor to the mid-1990s' International Adult Literacy Survey.

See the

Although basic literacy rates have traditionally been an essential part of any statistical description of a country, such figures have lost their utility for wealthy nations because the rudimentary skills they measure are so widespread. The 99% basic literacy rate for the United States,1 for example, sheds little light on the extent to which American adults are able to integrate information from multiple sources or make inferences from written materials, skills they need to fully participate in an increasingly complex society.

More revealing are measures that treat literacy as a continuous rather than a categorical variable—that is, measures that gauge degree of literacy rather than classifying people as either literate or nonliterate. Figures V-1a and V-1b present data from the Adult Literacy and Lifeskills Survey (ALL), which assessed both the prose and document literacy of adults in a number of developed countries. (For an overview of the ALL and its predecessor, the International Adult Literacy Survey, please visit the National Center for Education Statistics website.) Prose literacy refers to the knowledge and skills needed to understand and use information from texts, including editorials, news stories, brochures, and instructional manuals. Document literacy is the knowledge and skills required to locate and use information contained in various formats, including job applications, payroll forms, transportation schedules, maps, tables, and charts. (See the Note on the Adult Literacy and Life Skills and International Adult Literacy Surveys Literacy Scales for a description of the skills associated with each of the ALL assessment scale’s five levels.)

Figure V-1a, Full Size Supporting Data

Figure V-1b, Full Size Supporting Data

With 47% of its population possessing at least those prose literacy skills necessary for successful secondary school completion, the United States was in the bottom third of the international rankings,2 below such countries as Norway, Bermuda, and Canada, while outstripping Italy and the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon by substantial margins. In the mid-1990s the United States had one of the largest percentages of highly literate adults, 21.9%, among participating nations, but by 2003 that percentage had dropped to 12.8, with the percentage of Americans who demonstrated weak literacy skills increasing proportionately. This decline was the largest experienced by any nation. The next largest decrease, 5.1 percentage points, occurred among Italian-speaking Swiss. The only statistically significant increase in the percentage of highly prose literate adults, 4.4 percentage points, was found among German-speaking Swiss.

Americans’ performance on the document literacy assessment was similar to that on the prose literacy assessment, placing the United States again in the bottom third of the international rankings (Figure V-1b). The change between 1994 and 2003 was of the same character as that observed with prose literacy, but of a lesser magnitude. The proportion of Americans with higher-order skills declined by 5 percentage points, while the ranks of those with weak skills grew by 7.5 points. Such a decline in the percentage of adults demonstrating high levels of document literacy was also observed in Canada and both French- and Italian-speaking Switzerland, the latter experiencing the greatest drop of any group or nation included in the study, 9.6 percentage points.

Adult Literacy and Life Skills and International Adult Literacy Surveys Literacy Scales Both assessments from which the data for this indicator were drawn employed a five- point scale to gauge adults’ literacy skills. For a detailed description of the skills associated with each level of the scale. Source: Statistics Canada and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Learning a Living: First Results of the Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey (Ottawa: Statistics Canada; Paris: OECD, 2005), table 1.1. Back to Content

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Indicator V-2	Family Literacy
Print V-2

This indicator concerns the percentage of preschool- and kindergarten-age children who were read to by a family member on a daily basis for years 1993 through 2001. Data from the National Center for Education Statistics’ (NCES) National Household Education Survey Program indicate that the early to mid-1990s saw an increase in family literacy rates, with the number of children read to by family members increasing from 53 to 58%. These gains were eroded over the latter part of the 1990s, but then another modest surge resulted in a 2001 family literacy rate that came within half a percent of the 1995 high (Figure V-2).

Figure V-2, Full Size Supporting Data

The family literacy data also reveal that the likelihood that a child was read to on a regular basis by a family member varied according to the educational level of his or her mother. Throughout the 1992–2001 time period, over 70% of young children whose mothers possessed at least a bachelor’s degree were read to every day, while the figure was less than 50% for the children of mothers with only a high school education.

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Indicator V-3	Book Reading
Print V-3

The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) provides the richest data available about the place of books in Americans’ lives. Conducted every five years by the National Endowment for the Arts, the survey generates data that permit an analysis of the trend in book reading in the United States over time. These data can also be compared to similar data collected for the European Union and thereby provide some measure of U.S. book-reading rates relative to those of other Western nations. The SPPA is also a source for data on the reading of literature specifically, and these findings are reviewed further on in this indicator.

According to the SPPA, the number of Americans who read at least one book of fiction or nonfiction in the previous 12 months (outside of work or school requirements) decreased in the decade between the early 1990s and the early 2000s. Thus, whereas in 1992, 61% of Americans reported having read a book for pleasure during the previous year, in 2002, 57% reported having done so (Figure V-3a). Although every age group registered a decline in book reading during that period, the greatest decrease occurred among young adults, with levels for 18-to-24-year-olds dropping 9 percentage points.

Figure V-3a, Full Size Supporting Data

In spite of the decline in book reading in the United States, anecdotal evidence suggests that book clubs (discussion groups) are currently a popular phenomenon. Data measuring the actual extent of Americans’ participation in them are scarce, however, and not available through the SPPA. The one survey of a nationally representative sample of adults that investigates book club involvement, a 2005 study sponsored by the Poetry Foundation, found that 6% of American adults who read for pleasure and primarily in English, or 3.4% of all adults,¹ participated in book clubs (full text of the study, entitled Poetry in America, can be found online at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/foundation/initiative_poetryamerica.html).

Whether such clubs are widespread outside the United States is unclear. What is apparent from a comparison of SPPA data with those collected by the European Union’s statistical agency, Eurostat, is that the nation’s 2002 book-reading rates were well above those of many European nations. As Figure V-3b shows, the United States ranked among the top third of nations surveyed in terms of the percentage of the population that read fiction or nonfiction for pleasure. Book reading was more common in the United States than in such countries as Italy, Germany, and France but less so than in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the Scandinavian nations of Finland and Sweden (the top-ranked country). In 2002, the United States also ranked fairly well internationally with respect to its percentage of “strong” readers, or persons who had read eight or more books outside of work or school over the previous year (Figure V-3c). Although the percentage for the United Kingdom was again higher, the United States’ rate, 23%, was fourth, along with that of the Netherlands and Denmark, out of the 16 countries surveyed.

Figure V-3b, Full Size Supporting Data

Figure V-3c, Full Size Supporting Data

As noted previously, the SPPA includes data not only on general national book-reading trends but also on the reading of literature per se in the United States. What these data reveal is that, whereas general levels of U.S. book reading dropped slightly between 1982 and 2002, literature suffered a more pronounced loss of popularity during that time. This decline, though apparent among Americans of all ages, was again especially pronounced among young people. Thus, while the percentage of Americans of all ages who read novels, short stories, plays, and poetry fell—from 57% in 1982 to 47% in 2002 (Figure V-3d), the rates for 18-to-24-year-olds and 25-to-34-year-olds plummeted 17 and 14 percentage points, respectively, in the course of those twenty years.

Figure V-3d, Full Size Supporting Data

Figure V-3e presents these same data on literature reading in such a way as to make the relative importance of two types of effects on reading rates more apparent. The first of these, the cohort effect, speaks to the influence of the respondents’ generation on their tendency to read literature. The other effect is that of the respondents’ age at the time of the interview. As the figure illustrates, the eldest three cohorts were fairly similar with respect to their rates of reading literature at different stages of their lives. For example, at ages 45–54, between approximately 52% and 57% of all three cohorts had read a novel, short story, poem, or play in the previous year. But the most recent cohort, consisting of those born between the late 1950s and 1960s, was substantially less likely to have done so, and for those 35–44 years old there was a difference in reading rates of over 12 percentage points between the most recent cohort and the two previous ones. The figure also reveals a negative age effect. For every cohort, literature reading rates were at least 10 percentage points lower for the oldest age group for which data were available than for the youngest. A comparable analysis of data on book reading more generally revealed similar cohort and age effects (however, because SPPA data on book reading are available for fewer cohorts, the results of the analysis were less definitive).

Figure V-3e, Full Size Supporting Data

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Indicator V-4	Creative Writing
Print V-4

Data on Americans’ involvement in creative writing (defined by the NEA, the collector of this information, as the writing of stories, poems, or plays not required for work or school) may provide a window on a particularly personal form of participation in the humanities, but what they also show is that overall participation rates were quite low from 1982 to 2002, when they ranged between 6.5% and 7.5% (Figure V-4). At the same time, however, these data indicate that in contrast to book reading (see Indicator V-3, Book Reading), participation in creative writing did not decline substantially during the period. On the contrary, slightly more Americans were engaged in creative writing in the first years of the 21st century than two decades earlier.

Figure V-4, Full Size Supporting Data

The greatest increases in creative writing occurred among Americans age 45 and older. In fact, participation rates more than doubled for those ages 55–64 and 75+. But even with the growing interest in creative writing among older Americans, the pursuit continued to be much more common among 18-to-24-year-olds than in any other age group. What the data reveal, then, is a strong negative correlation between creative writing and age, with the tendency to write dropping off sharply after age 24 and continuing to decline as an individual moves through middle and late life.

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Indicator V-5	Multilingualism
Print V-5

Because Americans’ multilingualism has implications not only for the nation’s ability to compete in a global marketplace but also for its capacity to develop and execute effective foreign policy, the extent to which Americans actually gain fluency in multiple languages is an extremely important question. Such multilingualism is the focus of this indicator, which also looks at where proficiency in languages other than English was acquired. (For data concerning trends in foreign-language course-taking at these levels, see Indicator I-7, Language Course Enrollment in Public High Schools, and Indicator II-7, Language Course-Taking at the Postsecondary Level.)

In January of 2006, President Bush launched the National Security Language Initiative, which is designed to “dramatically increase the number of Americans learning critical need foreign languages such as Arabic, Chinese [Mandarin], Russian, Hindi, Persian, and others through new and expanded programs from kindergarten through university and into the workforce.”1 For all the present concern about what is perceived as a national foreign-language deficit, however, existing data on multilingualism are of limited use in gauging the true extent of the country’s achieved fluency in multiple languages. This is true for several reasons. First, such data are based on self-report—currently no system objectively measures and registers individuals’ multilingual capabilities. Second, the only national trend data that exist, those drawn from the decennial census, reflect a concern with immigrants’ ability to acquire English language skills and thus describe only non-English use in the home. These data do not capture those individuals who have gained their proficiency in non-English language(s) via formal instruction; nor do they account for those who may have learned a non-English language in their childhood home (and still speak it fluently) but who do not use that language in their own homes as adults. Moreover, census data do not measure the extent of individuals’ proficiency in their non-English “home” language. Finally, the census and other current data collection efforts in this area are structured to measure Americans’ proficiency in just one language other than English and thus do not reveal how many people have facility in three or more languages. Although these data cannot measure the full extent of the nation’s multilingualism, they are the best available and are presented below.

Figure V-5a displays the relevant census data from 1980 to 2000. While a language question has appeared on almost every decennial census since 1870, only since 1980 have respondents been asked not only if they speak a language other than English but also how proficient they are in English. Between 1980 and 2000, the percentage of Americans age 18 or over who were bilingual, defined here as individuals who 1) report speaking a non-English language at home and 2) describe themselves as speaking English “well” or “very well,” rose from 9.2% to 13.1%.

Figure V-5a, Full Size Supporting Data

In 2000, the majority of bilingual Americans age 18 or older (52%) spoke Spanish or Spanish Creole in addition to English (Figure V-5b). Just over a quarter spoke another Indo-European language, and 16% spoke an Asian or Pacific Island language. Included among the remaining 5% of bilingual Americans whose second language is labeled “Other” were those individuals who spoke indigenous languages of North, Central, and South America; Semitic languages (Arabic and Hebrew); and languages of Africa. The figure also highlights the small percentages of bilingual Americans who were fluent in certain of the languages identified as “critical need” under the new federal initiative.

Figure V-5b, Full Size Supporting Data

Data from the 2000 General Social Survey (GSS), administered by the National Opinion Research Center, provide a somewhat different estimate of the extent of bilingualism in the United States. The focus of the GSS was respondents’ proficiency in a non-English language, and thus it did not assess foreign-language speakers’ proficiency in English. An advantage of GSS data, however, is that they capture those individuals who learned a non-English language outside the home, as well as those who learned the language at home as children but who, while still fluent in the non-English language, spoke only English in their own homes.

According to GSS data from the year 2000 (Figure V-5c), approximately 16.3% of the American adult population was bilingual (a bilingual individual is defined here as speaking English and another language, the latter either “well” or “very well”). Only 2.8% of all American adults developed their non-English competence through school-based instruction. The vast majority of bilingual adults (83%) acquired their second language at home.

Figure V-5c, Full Size Supporting Data

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Indicator V-6	Adult Continuing Education
Print V-6

Since 1999, the NCES has collected information on levels of participation in adult education as part of its National Household Education Survey Program. Beginning in 2001, these data included the subject matter of courses in which students enrolled. Such courses were not taken as part of a degree or certificate program, though college credit may have been earned.

Survey findings indicate that between 2001 and 2005 a small but growing percentage of adults pursued continuing education in the humanities. In 2001, 1% of the American population over the age of 16, approximately 2 million people, had taken at least one humanities course for personal interest or development in the previous 12 months. By 2005, the proportion had risen to 1.5%, or approximately 3.3 million people (Figure V-6a).

Figure V-6a, Full Size Supporting Data

In both 2001 and 2005, adult education students in the humanities tended to be young (Figure V-6b), with approximately 50% of all such students having been between the ages of 16 and 34. However, the character of the age distribution changed considerably over the four-year period. Whereas in 2001 those in the youngest age category (16–24) were by far the most numerous, in 2005 humanities course takers were spread somewhat more evenly across the age categories. Another striking difference between the two time points is the significantly higher proportion of course takers in 2005 who were between 55 and 64, their proportion having increased from 5% to 14.5% of all adult education students in the humanities.

Figure V-6b, Full Size Supporting Data

Adult education students were somewhat more likely to be women than men (Figure V-5c). In 2001, 56% of those taking such classes were female, though by 2005 the gender gap was less pronounced, with women constituting 52.8% of course takers.

Figure V-6c, Full Size Supporting Data