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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