No there are educated Americans who do read and shit. It's just the Americans who are educated are all either capitalists or members of the petite bourgeois like lawyers or doctors.
My parents are petite bourgeois Americans and they each read over one big book a month. But they're also both very right wing and very educated.
We live in a society where the only people who engage in books and educating themselves are the elite of social, who in their class interests are going to side with capital.
It's the exact same way here in Ireland where I live now. Working class people don't read but the bourgeoisie and petite bourgeois do.