Literacy—fading? A distant memory?

What will happen to reading and writing in our time?

Could the doomsayers be right? Computers, they maintain, are destroying literacy. The signs—students’ declining reading scores, the drop in leisure reading to just minutes a week, the fact that half the adult population reads no books in a year—are all pointing to the day when a literate American culture becomes a distant memory. By contract, optimists foresee the Internet ushering in a new, vibrant participatory culture of words. Will they carry the day?

Maybe neither. Let me suggest a third possibility: Literacy—or an ensemble of literacies—will continue to thrive, but in forms and formats we can’t yet envision. Read this commentary by cognitive psychologist Howard Gardner in The Washington Post online.