Here is the podcast Literacy is an important skill in modern societies. A person's level of literacy is usually a better indicator of economic and professional success than years of schooling, since many university graduates are not so literate. Literacy seems to be at the core of many social problems, since poor literacy leads to poor earning power and other problems. Literacy is a popular issue to get out and support, for individuals and corporations and politicians. I must admit that it is an issue that I can easily get behind, although my interest is not unrelated to my involvement with LingQ since I think LingQ is a great tool for helping people improve literacy in their own language as well as learn a new language. Two popular activities that supposedly promote literacy are national scale spelling bees, and the "onebook" reading campaign. As usual I have a somewhat contrary point of view. The best way to improve literacy is to read, a lot. So I do not understand the relationship between reading and the spelling bee. I would imagine that mostly good spellers go into spelling bees, not the children who do not read. In any case, it is better to read than to study isolated lists of obscure words. I am not sure that the spelling bee actually encourages those who do not have the reading habit, to go and pick up a book and start reading. As for the "onebook" campaign, this too seems aimed at people who already read. Undoubtedly some panel of "experts" decides which book everyone should read. But I fail to see why that is a way to promote reading. It can be fun for people in a book club to read the same book and discuss it, but if we want to encourage more people to read we should really encourage them to read whatever they are interested in. I am curious to hear opinions on how to get more people to read, for their own sake and for the sake of society, since poor performance in our society seems to be linked to poor reading skills or reading habits. Less