A couple of points on this.

Rise Up Singing--which you in the UK can count yourselves lucky to be spared--is the allltime worst. [...] it makes it easy to avoid any preparation at all--especially for groups which have a lot of that particular tome.

So you can have the edifying spectacle of a whole group plowing through every verse printed in the book--though they have never seen some of them. To a tune they also don't know.

That describes the hymn singing in a typical church service perfectly. I wonder whether the reason that phenomenon took off in the US but not here is simply because Americans still go to church and they're used to it?

Back to the original issue JAJ raised: what to do about it?

I've a couple of encounters with folder-carriers recently in situations where I didn't expect to find them, and further dug in to their folders than I expected. A lot of people get MORE dependent on sheet music over time. I suspect one reason may be that the repertoire is expanding faster than they can cope with; instead of encountering tunes at their own pace, the social institutions of the session/singaround and educational workshops mean that the stuff flows into the scene faster than they can learn it. So they resort to paper as a coping mechanism. In a situation where they were just playing to mostly non-musical social and family circle, as might have been the case a few decades ago, there was less pressure to know lots of stuff.

OK, what to do about it?

The sort of hectoring intolerance and institutional barriers that some people here seem to want just won't work. That does nothing at all to encourage anyone and just makes enemies.

What I'm seeing is the development of dependence on paper as an insidious process where people aren't really aware of how much they're limiting themselves until they can't see any way out. So maybe a better approach might be to encourage people to learn to do without paper one page at a time? Anybody found a way to
organize that?