“I can never find a book I like.”

“Who has the time to read in this day and age?”

“I find it boring. It’s just not my thing.”

You hear such remarks all the time on campus concerning reading for pleasure and even more so for academic assignments. And with the nation’s official literacy rate at 99.99 percent in 2015 according to the CIA World Factbook, what’s the big deal? Looking at those numbers, the so-called “education crisis” in America is virtually nonexistent and appears completely blown out of proportion. If reading’s just “not your thing,” no big deal.

Right?

Unfortunately, wrong. For one thing, the CIA World Factbook does not use the Department of Education or the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES, the primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data related to education in the U.S.) as one of their research sources. Also, because there is no universal definition or standard of literacy itself, the CIA World Factbook uses the most common definition: the ability to read and write at a specified age.

For the CIA, the age is 15 years-old with five or more years of schooling under the belt. The inherent problem with this statistic is the Census Bureau interviewed and mailed forms to a relatively small number of Americans from which to draw data. If someone simply said they could read or write, they were believed. The bureau also assumed that anyone with a fifth grade education had an 80 percent likelihood of literacy. Obviously households who did not have a literate member of the family did not send a response to the mailings.

However, on a more fundamental level, the CIA statistic does not reflect the average citizen’s level of ability. That paints quite a different story.

The most substantial government study on the issue was the National Assessment of Adult Literacy in 2003, when about 90,700 individuals were interviewed thoroughly across 12 states. The results showed that at least 21 percent of adults assessed were unable to locate information in text, make low-level inferences using printed materials, or integrate easily identifiable pieces of information. At least 41 percent of adults on the lowest levels of literacy lived in poverty.

According to a 2015 study by the Department of Education, the number of American adults who can’t read is now 32 million.

In addition to poverty, illiteracy rates have direct ties to violence, crime, and unemployment. Illiteracy costs the American healthcare industry $70 million annually. The more illiterate a voter is, the more likely they are to not vote at all, or to vote by political party rather than the actual views of a candidate.

Also, a study by The New School for Social Research found that reading literary fiction (such as Great Expectations by Charles Dickens) rather than romance novels or thrillers (such as Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl) improves your ability to empathize with others. Because the majority of human conflict ultimately stems from the inability to understand and communicate properly, this is perhaps one of the more compelling studies of literacy’s crucial importance.

So get out there and read. Show everybody that reading’s not nearly as boring, difficult or irrelevant as they might think in this new technology-driven era. Discuss your favorite books with friends, with professors, with strangers on the bus, but especially with children. Instill in them a love of reading that will carry on for the rest of their life. As cliché as it sounds, children are indeed the future. For that future to be bright, it is our responsibility to educate them on reading’s extensive influence.

And to the undergraduates who think they’re above reproach—perhaps feeling a bit boisterous about their already college-validated intellect—try to be careful. The average required summer reading of an incoming freshman is at the seventh-grade level.

Happy reading!