The shameful secret of illiteracy in America
The word is not just a sound or a written symbol. The word is a force; it is the power you have to express and communicate, to think and therefore to create the events in your life. -Don Miguel Ruiz
A New Jersey woman, “Maria”, was reading at a third grade level. She had a job and managed to do everyday tasks without reading. When she went to a restaurant, she would order what she knew was on the menu: a hamburger, salad, or grilled chicken, or she would point to someone else’s plate at the next table and ask “what are you eating?” “. Maria even went so far as to keep her illiteracy a secret, even from her husband of ten years. Since she couldn’t read the mail, she would pretend that she had forgotten her glasses at work or say that she had been too busy to open the mail and ask her husband to do it. One day, they passed a shop window with a sign. While they were looking at the screen, the husband suddenly realized that his wife could not read. Maria was embarrassed and humiliated. But she sought help and now she reads, works on a computer and teaches others to read.
In 2002, before the Committee on Education and the Workforce of the Subcommittee on Education Reform of the United States House of Representatives, actor James Earl Jones testified: “92 million Americans have low or very low literacy skills; they cannot read beyond the sixth grade level. To be illiterate in the United States, or anywhere, is to be insecure, uncomfortable, and unprotected. For the illiterate, despair and defeat serve as daily food. Can any of us who can read really understand the sadness that is associated with the inability to read? Can we really relate to the silent humiliation, the silent despair that cannot be expressed, the hundreds of ways those who cannot read fight in shame to keep their secret? The struggle over illiteracy…is still a part of American history.”
Today, our nation is facing an epidemic that is destructive to our future. The disease is functional illiteracy. According to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), he has outperformed a third of American children in fourth grade, including two-thirds of African-American students and nearly half of all middle school children. of cities.
The basic definition of literacy is the ability to read and write. So the basic definition of illiteracy is the inability to read and write.
Beyond basic definitions, there is meaning in the shocking statistics on the functionally illiterate. What illiteracy means is that millions of people may not be able to understand the instructions on a medicine bottle, or read their phone bill, give correct change at a store, find and keep a job, or read to a child.
Illiteracy has long been seen as a social and educational problem, someone else’s problem. However, more recently we have come to understand the economic consequences of a lack of literacy for the United States and American businesses.
Illiteracy has a significant impact on the economy. According to the Nation’s Business magazine, 15 million working adults today are functionally illiterate. The American Life Insurance Council reports that three-quarters of Fortune 500 companies provide some level of remedial training for their workers. And, a study by the Northeastern Midwest Institute and Regional Policy Center found that business losses attributed to basic skill deficiencies run into the hundreds of millions of dollars due to low productivity, errors, and accidents.
Additionally, as reported in the 1986 publication Making Literacy Programs Work: A Practical Guide for Correctional Educators (for the US Department of Justice, National Institute of Corrections), half of all adults in correctional institutions federal and state can’t read or read. write at all. Only about a third of those in prison have completed high school.
The evidence indicates that the problem starts at home. A National Governors Association task force on adult literacy reported that illiteracy is an intergenerational problem, following a parent-child pattern. Poor school performance and dropping out before finishing school are common among children of illiterate parents.
The reasons for illiteracy are as varied as the number of non-readers. The adult who does not read may have left school early, may have had a physical or emotional disability, may have had ineffective teachers, or may simply not have been ready to learn when reading instruction began.
Because they cannot help their children learn, parents who cannot read often perpetuate the intergenerational cycle of illiteracy. Without books, newspapers or magazines in the home and a reading parent to serve as a role model, many children grow up with severe literacy deficiencies. Clearly, there is no single cause of illiteracy.
Adults have many reasons to ask for help with reading. Many are motivated by the need to increase literacy levels in their jobs. Others may want to read to a child, read the Bible, or write to a family member for the first time. All express the hope of a better quality of life through higher levels of literacy.
According to Barbara Bush, “It suddenly occurred to me that everything I care about – broken families, drugs, AIDS, homelessness – would all be better if more people could read, write and understand.”
Let’s all do what we can to make illiteracy not part of the story for Americans today, but part of America’s past.