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

 

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.