Literacy

I am currently sitting at a computer in the Issaquah library. It's a pretty happy place to be, as I like libraries, and I love Issaquah. A few minutes ago, I was in an armchair reading about the Second Industrial Revolution for AP Euro History, a funny face caught my eye... I looked up. It was a makeup commercial on the back of a magazine, which a middle-aged woman was holding up to her face as she read it. It freaked me out at first, because the magazine face was about the same size as her real one, and it took me a couple seconds to realize it wasn't her actual face. Once I had gotten over the initial shock, I noticed that the magazine was in Spanish. I grinned and nerdily read the cover (for those of you who don't know, I'm an incredible Spanish nerd). An elderly couple sitting a few yards to the right of me were having a conversation in some type of Indian language, a young father in front of me was speaking to his two boys in what I think was Mandarin, and a few yards behind him sat another old man reading a Korean newspaper (my friends taught me how to tell it was Korean one day at lunch last week. I feel so smart. Not). A kind of hobo-ish looking guy came in and sat down at a table, a couple awkward sixth graders gushed over some bad teen fiction behind me, a mother could be heard reading aloud to her toddler. And having just come out of the crowded slums of 19th-century Europe, I was suddenly back in a very contrasting setting. Everyone, from the smallest children to the elderly, was sitting around making sense of little squiggles and lines on pages and turning them into words, for fun. And what's more, in this funny new age, everyone, whether rich or poor or average Joe, could walk into a big building filled with pages full of squiggles and lines and make sense of them all, should they care to. I think that's pretty cool. The extent to which modern society educates its citizens is incredible- think about it, it was only a couple hundred years ago that these places were being built. Just half a dozen decades ago, it's likely that we wouldn't have been able to read at all. Hmm.