At the signing of the U.S. Constitution in 1787, nearly 60 percent of about 3 million American adults could read¹ but in the following 19th and 20th centuries, literacy rates in America grew rapidly. In 1870, almost 80 percent of 38.5 million Americans were literate and by 1940, almost 95 percent of 131 million citizens could read. Now, nearly 294 million Americans of about 300 million are literate and most children can read by the time they’re six or seven. According to the Census Bureau, 25-34 year-olds are now the best educated group of Americans: nearly 58 percent have some college education, and almost 27 percent have a bachelor’s degree or more. The percentages drop with each subsequent age group, retrospectively suggesting that over time, each new generation will be more educated, and therefore more literate, than the last.

Worldwide, literacy has steadily increased from 56 percent of almost 2 billion adults (ages 15 and over) in 1950 to 83 percent of about 4.5 billion adults in 2008. In 2008, UNESCO reported that between 1995 and 2008, there was “an overall global increase of about 6 percent (from 77 percent to 83 percent) in rates of adult (aged 15 years and older) literacy (representing a relative increase of 8 percent).”

I once posted on my blog, “no one reads anymore.” And was chastised in the comments for it. This post for McSweeney’s is a great example of how much we do read.

Since I’ve fallen victim to the fallacy of bemoaning the state of reading, I’ve noticed how it’s used.

Mostly, I think what people mean when they something like it is: people aren’t well-read in the canon anymore. And that is to be expected: the canon used to be a rather small body of work in comparison to the amount of available reading materials.

We just have a lot more options now. From Dan Brown to newspapers to … well, this blog.