I wrote a news story last week on a study that ranked St. Louis  as the sixth most literate city in the country.  You can find the story under the "most e-mailed" stories of the last seven days.

Since then, I've gotten a few notes from folks  noting that  the city's children are often poorly educated,  etc.  The story did note that we ranked low in the education factor. And yes, that story also noted that the methodology of the study  may be a bit off: They counted St. Louis bookstores, for example using an internet yellow pages site, which surveyed the entire St. Louis County area too. But then the study used the population of St. Louis city to figure a ranking. When I asked the   spokesman for the study about that, he didn't deny it, but said it didn't really matter because they use the same methods and sources for every city.    I think, in effect, he said that it all  comes out in the wash.

Several of the rankings for St. Louis  were probably affected by the fact that we have a smallish city population.

Anyway, I wanted to note that I am well-aware of some  of the weaknesses of the methodology.By writing about the news of that study, I am not personally  promoting it.  Let's also note that a different study that  ranked St. Louis   high in murders used a similar methodology.

Perhaps some readers would like to post their thoughts here about what they think of that study.

I'd like to note that such things, flawed as they are, do gather and compare statistics about  parts of our culture  that we might not know. It IS true that St. Louis has a good library system for its size. The city library system receives a greater percentage from tax dollars than the county system does.

St. Louis and Missouri in general also have more than their share of literary journals. This is something that not a lot of people realize. And the Post-Dispatch's circulation is not, in fact, declining as quickly as  that of many other cities' newspapers.

Now whether those things are enough to offset the education problems the city has in terms of qualifying as "literate," I don't know. What do you think?