Intellectual Espionage
At the start of WWII millions of men showed up at registration offices to take low-level
academic tests before being inducted. 1 The years of maximum mobilization were 1942
to 1944; the fighting force had been mostly schooled in the 1930s, both those inducted
and those turned away. Of the 18 million men were tested, 17,280,000 of them were
judged to have the minimum competence in reading required to be a soldier, a 96 percent
literacy rate. Although this was a 2 percent fall-off from the 98 percent rate among
voluntary military applicants ten years earlier, the dip was so small it didn't worry
anybody.
WWII was over in 1945. Six years later another war began in Korea. Several million men
were tested for military service but this time 600,000 were rejected. Literacy in the draft
pool had dropped to 81 percent, even though all that was needed to classify a soldier as
literate was fourth- grade reading proficiency. In the few short years from the beginning
of WWII to Korea, a terrifying problem of adult illiteracy had appeared. The Korean War
group received most of its schooling in the 1940s, and it had more years in school with
more professionally trained personnel and more scientifically selected textbooks than the
WWII men, yet it could not read, write, count, speak, or think as well as the earlier, less-
schooled contingent.
A third American war began in the mid-1960s. By its end in 1973 the number of men
found noninductible by reason of inability to read safety instructions, interpret road signs,
decipher orders, and so on — in other words, the number found illiterate — had reached 27
percent of the total pool. Vietnam-era young men had been schooled in the 1950s and the
1960s — much better schooled than either of the two earlier groups — but the 4 percent
illiteracy of 1941 which had transmuted into the 19 percent illiteracy of 1952 had now
had grown into the 27 percent illiteracy of 1970. Not only had the fraction of competent
readers dropped to 73 percent but a substantial chunk of even those were only barely
adequate; they could not keep abreast of developments by reading a newspaper, they
could not read for pleasure, they could not sustain a thought or an argument, they could
not write well enough to manage their own affairs without assistance.
Consider how much more compelling this steady progression of intellectual blindness is
when we track it through army admissions tests rather than college admissions scores and
standardized reading tests, which inflate apparent proficiency by frequently changing the
way the tests are scored.
Looking back, abundant data exist from states like Connecticut and Massachusetts to
show that by 1 840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was between 93
and 100 percent wherever such a thing mattered. According to the Connecticut census of
1840, only one citizen out of every 579 was illiterate and you probably don't want to
know, not really, what people in those days considered literate; it's too embarrassing.
Popular novels of the period give a clue: Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826, sold so
well that a contemporary equivalent would have to move 10 million copies to match it. If
you pick up an uncut version you find yourself in a dense thicket of philosophy, history,
culture, manners, politics, geography, analysis of human motives and actions, all
conveyed in data-rich periodic sentences so formidable only a determined and well-
educated reader can handle it nowadays. Yet in 1818 we were a small-farm nation
without colleges or universities to speak of. Could those simple folk have had more
complex minds than our own?
By 1940, the literacy figure for all states stood at 96 percent for whites, 80 percent for
blacks. Notice that for all the disadvantages blacks labored under, four of five were
nevertheless literate. Six decades later, at the end of the twentieth century, the National
Adult Literacy Survey and the National Assessment of Educational Progress say 40
percent of blacks and 17 percent of whites can't read at all. Put another way, black
illiteracy doubled, white illiteracy quadrupled. Before you think of anything else in
regard to these numbers, think of this: we spend three to four times as much real money
on schooling as we did sixty years ago, but sixty years ago virtually everyone, black or
white, could read.
In their famous bestseller, The Bell Curve, prominent social analysts Charles Murray and
Richard Herrnstein say that what we're seeing are the results of selective breeding in
society. Smart people naturally get together with smart people, dumb people with dumb
people. As they have children generation after generation, the differences between the
groups gets larger and larger. That sounds plausible and the authors produce impressive
mathematics to prove their case, but their documentation shows they are entirely ignorant
of the military data available to challenge their contention. The terrifying drop in literacy
between World War II and Korea happened in a decade, and even the brashest survival-
of-the-fittest theorist wouldn't argue evolution unfolds that way. The Bell Curve writers
say black illiteracy (and violence) is genetically programmed, but like many academics
they ignore contradictory evidence.
For example, on the matter of violence inscribed in black genes, the inconvenient parallel
is to South Africa where 3 1 million blacks live, the same count living in the United
States. Compare numbers of blacks who died by violence in South Africa in civil war
conditions during 1989, 1990, and 1991 with our own peacetime mortality statistics and
you find that far from exceeding the violent death toll in the United States or even
matching it, South Africa had proportionately less than one-quarter the violent death rate
of American blacks. If more contemporary comparisons are sought, we need only
compare the current black literacy rate in the United States (56 percent) with the rate in
Jamaica (98.5 percent) — a figure considerably higher than the American white literacy
rate (83 percent).
If not heredity, what then? Well, one change is indisputable, well-documented and easy
to track. During WWII, American public schools massively converted to non-phonetic
ways of teaching reading. On the matter of violence alone this would seem to have
impact: according to the Justice Department, 80 percent of the incarcerated violent
criminal population is illiterate or nearly so (and 67 percent of all criminals locked up).
There seems to be a direct connection between the humiliation poor readers experience
and the life of angry criminals. 2
As reading ability plummeted in America after WWII, crime soared, so did out-of-
wedlock births, which doubled in the 1950s and doubled again in the '60s, when bizarre
violence for the first time became commonplace in daily life.
When literacy was first abandoned as a primary goal by schools, white people were in a
better position than black people because they inherited a three-hundred-year-old
American tradition of learning to read at home by matching spoken sound with letters,
thus home assistance was able to correct the deficiencies of dumbed-down schools for
whites. But black people had been forbidden to learn to read under slavery, and as late as
1930 only averaged three to four years of schooling, so they were helpless when teachers
suddenly stopped teaching children to read, since they had no fall-back position. Not
helpless because of genetic inferiority but because they had to trust school authorities to a
much greater extent than white people.
Back in 1952 the Army quietly began hiring hundreds of psychologists to find out how
600,000 high school graduates had successfully faked illiteracy. Regna Wood sums up
the episode this way:
After the psychologists told the officers that the graduates weren't faking, Defense
Department administrators knew that something terrible had happened in grade school
reading instruction. And they knew it had started in the thirties. Why they remained
silent, no one knows. The switch back to reading instruction that worked for everyone
should have been made then. But it wasn't.
In 1882, fifth graders read these authors in their Appleton School Reader. William
Shakespeare, Henry Thoreau, George Washington, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain,
Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Bunyan, Daniel Webster, Samuel
Johnson, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others like them.
In 1995, a student teacher of fifth graders in Minneapolis wrote to the local newspaper, "I
was told children are not to be expected to spell the following words correctly: back, big,
call, came, can, day, did, dog, down, get, good, have, he, home, if, in, is, it, like, little,
man, morning, mother, my, night, off, out, over, people, play, ran, said, saw, she, some,
soon, their, them, there, time, two, too, up, us, very, water, we, went, where, when, will,
would, etc. Is this nuts?"
1 The discussion here is based on Regna Lee Wood's work as printed in Chester Finn and Diane Ravitch's
Network News and Views (and reprinted many other places). Together with other statistical indictments,
from the National Adult Literacy Survey, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and a host of
other credible sources, it provides chilling evidence of the disastrous turn in reading methodology. But in a
larger sense the author urges every reader to trust personal judgment over "numerical" evidence, whatever
the source. During the writer's 30-year classroom experience, the decline in student ability to comprehend
difficult text was marked, while the ability to extract and parrot "information" in the form of "facts" was
much less affected. This is a product of deliberate pedagogy, to what end is the burden of my essay.
2 A particularly clear example of the dynamics hypothesized to cause the correlation can be found in
Michael S. Brunner's monograph, "Reduced Recidivism and Increased Employment Opportunity Through
Research-Based Reading Instruction," United States Department of Justice (June 1992). Brunner's recent
book Retarding America, written as a Visiting Fellow for the U.S. Department of Justice, is recommended.
A growing body of documentation ties illiteracy causally to violent crime. A study by Dennis Hogenson
titled "Reading Failure and Juvenile Delinquency" (Reading Reform Foundation) attempted to correlate
teenage aggression with age, family size, number of parents present in home, rural versus urban
environment, socio-economic status, minority group membership, and religious preference. None of these
factors produced a significant correlation. But one did. As the author reports, "Only reading failure was
found to correlate with aggression in both populations of delinquent boys." An organization of ex-prisoners
testified before the Sub-Committee on Education of the U.S. Congress that in its opinion illiteracy was an
important causative factor in crime "for the illiterate have very few honest ways to make a living." In 1994
the U.S. Department of Education acknowledged that two-thirds of all incarcerated criminals have poor
literacy.
Looking Behind Appearances
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