40. Intellectual Espionage: The Underground History of American
Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
40. 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.
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