47. The National Adult Literacy Survey: The Underground History of
American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
The
National Adult Literacy Survey
In 1982, Anthony Oettinger, a member of
the private discussion group called the Council
on Foreign Relations, asked an audience of communications executives
this question: "Do we really have
to have everybody literate — writing and reading in the traditional sense — when we have means through our
technology to achieve a new flowering of oral
communication?" Oettinger suggested "our idea of
literacy" is "obsolete." Eighty-three years earlier John Dewey had written in
"The Primary Education Fetish" that "the plea for the predominance of learning to read in early
school life because of the great importance
attaching to literature seems to be a perversion."
For
the balance of this discussion I'm going to step into deeper water, first
reviewing what reading in a Western
alphabet really means and what makes it a reasonably easy skill to transmit or to self-teach, and then
tackling what happened to deprive the ordinary
person of the ability to manage it very well. I want to first show you
how, then answer the more speculative
question why.
The
National Adult Literacy Survey represents 190 million U.S. adults over age
sixteen with an average school
attendance of 12.4 years. The survey is conducted by the Educational Testing Service of Princeton, New
Jersey. It ranks adult Americans into five
levels. Here is its 1993 analysis:
1. Forty-two million Americans over the
age of sixteen can't read. Some of this
group can write their names on Social Security cards and fill in height,
weight, and birth spaces on application
forms.
2.
Fifty million can recognize printed words on a fourth- and fifth-grade level.
They cannot write simple messages or
letters.
3.
Fifty- five to sixty million are limited to sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade
reading. A majority of this group could
not figure out the price per ounce of peanut butter in a 20-ounce jar costing $1 .99 when told
they could round the answer off to a
whole number.
4. Thirty million have ninth- and
tenth-grade reading proficiency. This group (and all preceding) cannot understand a simplified
written explanation of the procedures
used by attorneys and judges in selecting juries.
5.
About 3.5 percent of the 26,000-member sample demonstrated literacy skills adequate to do traditional college study, a
level 30 percent of all U.S. high school
students reached in 1940, and which 30 percent of secondary students in
other developed countries can reach
today. This last fact alone should warn you how
misleading comparisons drawn from international student competitions
really are, since the samples each
country sends are small elite ones, unrepresentative of the entire student population. But behind the
bogus superiority a real one is
concealed.
6. Ninety-six and a half percent of the
American population is mediocre to illiterate
where deciphering print is concerned. This is no commentary on
their intelligence, but without ability
to take in primary information from print and to interpret it they are at the mercy of
commentators who tell them what things
mean. A working definition of immaturity might include an excessive need
for other people to interpret
information for us.
Certainly it's possible to argue that bad
readers aren't victims at all but perpetrators,
cursed by inferior biology to possess only shadows of intellect. That's
what bell-curve theory, evolutionary
theory, aristocratic social theory, eugenics theory, strong-state political theory, and some kinds of theology
are about. All agree most of us are inferior,
if not downright dangerous. The integrity of such theoretical outlooks —
at least where reading was concerned —
took a stiff shot on the chin from America. Here, democratic practice allowed a revolutionary generation to
learn how to read. Those granted the
opportunity took advantage of it brilliantly.
Name
Sounds, Not Things
No comments:
Post a Comment