24 Responses to Massive Illiteracy in America 42 Million and Counting

1. sadlyyes October 11th, 2009 at 8:29 am «

   sorry the article inbed did not work
   here it is

   http://www.inteldaily.com/news/173/ARTICLE/12166/2009-10-09.html
2. Blub October 11th, 2009 at 9:34 am «

   Thanks or posting this. I have long been concerned about illiteracy in this country. Our country’s agreements with the UN allow us to show a “deemed” adult literacy rate of 100%, although this is obviously untrue. I would tend to believe that the absolute adult illiteracy rate (4th grade level) is not quite as high as high as 42 million of 280 million adults, which would imply a rate as high as that of India. Other studies have put adult illiteracy in the US at between 24 to 28 million – still absurd. The real problem is the next group of about 40 million or more (in addition to the 24 million) who are barely literate (able to function at only the middle school level).

   I suspect it is this latter group that are most susceptible to rethug propaganda and political manipulation – they can grasp just enough of the reality around them to be dangerous. The absolutely illiterate are probably too busy trying to survive.
3. iremember54 October 11th, 2009 at 11:22 am «

   They are the voters, because they think it is patriotic to vote. Yes they fall for the two parties, and the politicians, and the retoric fed them. You see the vote is supposed to be our way of controlling our Government. An illiterate populous that votes, has allowed our politics to ruin the principals of this Country. Litteracy matters because it is the difference to people knowing whats good for them, right and worng, or who and what they are voting for. Our Government doesn’t work because these people keep voting in people who care not for Country or it’s people, only their ideaolgy and how much money and power they can get from office.
   The Media feeds the illiterate because they watch, listen, and believe.
4. Blub October 11th, 2009 at 12:58 pm «

   I think the other part of the problem here is the basic architecture of public primary and secondary education in the US.  This system emerged in it’s current form in the mid-20th century to better help our country wage total war.  Effectively, it takes the form of a vast triage machine (kind of like America’s private healthcare system now that I think of it).  It’s purpose was to identify, train and encourage the best and the brightest to become technicians, engineers, doctors, leaders, to facilitate the increase of national power and, yes, national warmaking capability.  The others could simply be triaged out.  Nobody cared what became of them.

   One popular critique (usually levelled by American rightwingers against foreign countries) is that whilst the American system emphasizes creativity and independent thought, the European, Japanese and now the Chinese systems emphasize rote learning (as if these same pundits care in the least that Americans are capable of independent thought… ironies abound).  This, they argue, assures America’s future greatness.  What they really mean is that the top fifth of American pupils get taught independent and creative thinking, the next half get their diplomas and GEDs and s bare modicum
   of (increasingly irrelevant) rote life skills and the balance get thrown out onto the public dungheap.  Because to wage the cold war effectively, we only needed so many missile designers…  

   Anthropologists who have observed classrooms in cross-cultural perspective have noted that classrooms are paced by the top fifth in the US and by the bottom third in Europe, Japan, and China.  Teachers in the US plow through the material at the rate of the best while teachers in those other countries tend to adjust their teaching to make sure that the slowest stay on track and motivated.  The few American teachers who do what is standard practice in those other countries are so rare that they are hailed as cultural heros in the US and have hit movies made of their
   lives –   Robbin’ hoods of public education, for not following the system’s standard operational logic.

   All this has to change if our country is going to start thriving again.  Chinese illiteracy (4th grade level) was 40% half a century ago, today it’s 8%, and much lower for younger cohorts (although, to be fair, its next group – 8th grade level – is still rather large).  It’s still a very poor country but it’s literacy rates are now already comparable to our own.   If the signs of the present remain unchanged, they will, within a decade, leave us behind.  

   If we want change, we can’t keep on saying, ‘but that’s OK because unlike them we let our top 3% learn indepedent thinking and creativity…” and that these lucky few will thus grow up to use their creative and independent thinking skills to rob the rest of the 97% as the CEOs, hedge fund mgrs and i-bankers they are destined to become.    The judgment of history won’t be gentle if we do.  Palin’s death panels may be bad enough when they are the basis of our nation’s private healthcare system.  As a basis for the American public school system, however, beggar-thy-neighbor rationing is a sure road to national suicide.           
5. iremember54 October 11th, 2009 at 2:17 pm «

   Our education system is a giant daycare system to give the kids somemhere to go while the parents are at work.
   Even back when I was in school, learning was less important than band, football, drama class and hords of other programs.
   You want Chidlren to learn, teach them. Encouraging them to play games, and be artistic does little to baic learning.
   We like to think we teach our children to be free thinkers, but in the same breath say this is the way it is.
   Free thinking also leads to, “I don’t have to learn this stuff, just pass the test.”
• ubetchaiam October 11th, 2009 at 2:21 pm «

  Hell, I didn’t even have to take the chemistry final back in 1963 because I had done so well during the year that even failing the final -by not showing up and playing pool in the local pool hall- I ended up with a ‘C’(3.0).
  BUT at least there were civics and social studies classes I had to take which are no longer required.
• iremember54 October 11th, 2009 at 2:32 pm «

  I skipped, didn’t study, and hated school. On my final exam that let me go from Jr. High to High, I hadn’t even paid attention but got the highest grade in the whole school class a perfect A. They swore I cheated, but I didn’t. The kid that sat next to me was a rich kid that came to school in suits, and usually got strait A’s, he only got a C. He was voted most likely to succeed because he was rich and would go to the best college. Years later after he was out of college, and I was a Forman for a sheet metal company. I went to the local hardware store, for bolts and guess who waited on me. All his poo poo got him doo doo.
6. ubetchaiam October 11th, 2009 at 2:18 pm «

   Michael Moore postulates that the death of newspapers in the U.S is specifically linked to the decline of literacy and it makes sense to me. He also asks why newspapers in europe aren’t having the same problem.
7. Blub October 11th, 2009 at 3:29 pm «

   I think the US generates about $35 per capita in published book sales per year, versus $89 in the UK. That’s a very big gap. There’s one study I can’t find again, from a few years ago, which suggested that 1/3rd of American high school grads never read another book again for the rest of their lives. Finally, there’s this study of the situation’s grimness:

   http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009482.pdf

   The US government’s 2009 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (actually a comparison of literacy between 1992 and 2003).

   shrubco reportedly didn’t want it coming out that Americans are gettin’ stoopider – on his watch – and that Congress might use the findings to call for more funding for social programs and education, so the most disturbing conclusions in the report are buried deep inside of it and the report was written in a way that made it intentionally difficult to read, but none of that changes the results.

   Note that comparisons between state’s aren’t really possible.. only between time periods, since each state has different means of sampling and testing for adult prose (written) literacy, so comparisons across states are not possible (California shows up with very high illiteracy because it has the toughest standards, for example). What’s importance is the change from 1992 to 2003.

   California: 23% in 2003, versus 15% in 1992 (wtf? there must be measurement error here)
   Florida: 20% in 2003, versus 15% in 1992
   New York: 22% in 2003, versus 16% in 1992 (also wtf)
   Texas: 19% in 2003, versus 18% in 1992

   Overall, 24 states saw statistically significant improvements (including, to be fair, significant improvements, albeit off a low base, in most Southeastern states), 5 states saw significant collapses in literacy but since those. were the most populous states, the overall literacy rate fell, and 22 states saw no statistically significant changes in literacy – mostly small drops. When one bears in mind that these numbers are supposed to be getting better over time, as each progressive generation, following the demographic mass, enjoys educational opportunities that their parents did not, this is not a good thing or a good sign.
• iremember54 October 11th, 2009 at 6:09 pm «

  I wrote a book called, “Why we have so many American Problems and what we can do about them.” It is available at all on line bookstores now. Sales are dismal, because I found out people don’t want to know about our problems or what to do about them.

  One gentleman told Me, ” You have alot of good stuff in there, but we can’t do anything about it.” He wasted my time writing it and his time reading it.

  Several older people that read it told me, “We didn’t want to know about all that bad stuff.”

  When You have people that shut out the truth, we have what we have.
• Blub October 11th, 2009 at 7:59 pm «

  well.. it is shrubco we’re talking about here… they
  make their own realities, remember?
8. ubetchaiam October 11th, 2009 at 4:40 pm «

   “Texas: 19% in 2003, versus 18% in 1992″ is a great example of “since each state has different means of sampling and testing for adult prose (written) literacy, so comparisons across states are not possible (California shows up with very high illiteracy because it has the toughest standards, for example).”

   Remember Rod Paige?
9. tejanarusa October 11th, 2009 at 5:02 pm «

   I have mixed feelings about numbers like these.
   On the one hand, some years ago our local paper published alarmist articles about the high rate of illiteracy in our county (Bexar Co., San Antonio TX).
   Turned out the measure was sixth grade education or less.
   My in-laws, 1st-generation Mexican-Americans, both dropped out of school in the sixth grade. They were most definitely literate: m-i-l read books regularly, family owned books and read to kids. F-i-l not so much a book-reader, but subscribed to newspaper(s) and read them front to back, every single article, every day. He got a GED by walking in and taking the test the same day he signed up for it, no classes at all (and he’s rather proud of that).
   Of course, that partly illustrates how much more and better kids were taught in early grades in the ’30′s and ’40′s than in today’s dumbed down schools.
   Have you ever looked at McGuffey’s Readers? I used to read my grandfather’s complete set, 1st through 6th grades, on visits as a kid. What the sixth-graders were expected to read in late 19th-early 20th cent. US rural schools would flummox many high-school students today. Complex words, complex sentences. Tendentious, moralistic stories, but those 6th graders could read them.
   Our infotainment culture, passive parenting, dumbing down, and the fact that we now have a couple of generations of parents who got the dumbed down education, too, plus some dumb education fads, all combine to produce this result. It is pitiful, and I really don’t see how we will ever correct it.
   Too many Americans just do not value education, from those who fear their kids will give up religion if they learn real science, to those who think they did just fine without it, so will their kids, to those who think their kids will grow up to be Michael Jordan or Troy Aikman.
• Blub October 11th, 2009 at 5:19 pm «

  I think that these concerns are legitimate at small scales (county and city levels, for instance). They become less meaningful for the state and national scales. Again, it’s the change over time that matters not the absolute levels. So.. illiteracy was 18% in 1992 and 19% in 2003 according to some standardized test.. I have no idea what this means in absolute terms except that it didn’t get any better over this interval. If it got a lot worse, though, I’d either (to your logic) expect to see a massive surge in foreign, non-English-speaking immigration to that state (something that could eassily happen on a county level, but is much more difficult to see happening for large demographic aggregates) or I’d expect to see politicians run out of town on a rail ;-).
10. ThingsComeUndone October 11th, 2009 at 8:16 pm «

    Newspapers lost 42 percent of their value during the 2006-07 period, added Rick Edmonds, media analyst for the Poynter Institute of St. Petersburg, Fla., “and then 83 per cent of their remaining value in 2008… We have only one publicly traded newspaper company at higher than $5 a share (The Washington Post) right now, which is mainly valued for its Kaplan Education subsidiary.”

    Virtually everything that we see, read, and hear is now controlled by roughly eight corporations,” he said, among them Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., Viacom, General Electric, and Disney. Disney, for example, owns ABC Television Network and ESPN besides Disney Channel and Radio Disney.

    http://www.inteldaily.com/news/173/ARTICLE/12166/2009-10-09.html

    Maybe the newspapers should not have supported so many GOP politicians who wanted to cut school funding?
    Maybe the GOP should not have invested in the media and then destroyed the value of the companies they owned by cutting school funding?
    And now that we are in a recession and Christmas is coming the biggest ad buy time of the year for the media companies a bad Christmas will hurt them.
    Remember all the MSM and how they supported Bush’s wars well Helicopter Ben said this week interest rates will not stay this low forever.
    Higher interest rates will kill consumer spending and that means less ad dollars for big media.
• ThingsComeUndone October 11th, 2009 at 8:21 pm «

  I guess what I’m trying to say sadlyyes is that the GOP and the MSM screwed themselves it will take a generation or more to get literacy back where it should be.
  But maybe the Net can make reading Cool again:)
• sadlyyes October 12th, 2009 at 7:49 am «

  they like it just the way it is
  ignorance is bliss

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4rBDUJTnNU
• BlueCrow October 12th, 2009 at 1:49 pm «

  Of course the GOP wanted it this way. The ignorant are the easiest to manipulate and can be conned into voting against human decency, that is, for the GOP.
11. readerOfTeaLeaves October 11th, 2009 at 10:02 pm «

    Great article, although I have a lot of quibbles with it.

    One: until the mid-20th century, no nation had ever tried to educate such a wide range of people. Ever. Never before in human history.

    Two: because of #1, people tend to get all pissed off about the quality of education. Well, that’s about 1/3 of the story. There is some great recent research on pre-reading skills and abilities; I’ve never seen a kid or adult learn to read without being ‘really ready’. Readiness includes auditory acuity, but in a world filled with noise and too much fast teevee and video, too few kids get the right kinds of auditory stimulation.

    Three: Yes, the problems with illiteracy make for enormous public policy problems. I’m personally convinced this is related to the teabagger issue.

    Four: Newspapers are partly screwed because they were cash cows in the 1980s, so they were bought up using leverage. Now, they’re under too much debt. In addition, people are super-busy and online info is handier for many of us these days…. what do they mean by ‘reading newspapers’.

    Five: unfortunately, I think that Arianna may have a key model; tons of celebrity stuff with a sprinkling of politics. So is politics entertainment, or the other way around?

    Six: Images aren’t necessarily nihilist – they can be, but they are not necessarily. (Think of Will.I.Am’s ‘Yes We Can’ viral video of 2008 on behalf of Obama; visual, but hardly ‘nihilistic’.) What we need is more, better education in the visual arts. For everyone.

    Seven: Glad to see this topic raised.

    Because of goals to have everyone read, we’ve discovered — to our shock! – that it’s not so easy for all to learn it. There are many different kinds of reading disabilities, and speaking personally I have seen some strange ones.

    So until we have more research resources, more small group instruction, more support for libraries, more visual arts instruction, and more early-learning focus on nursery rhymes and folk tales, none of this is going to be solved.

    And it is a HUGE problem. Huuuuuuuuuuuge.
12. maheanuu October 11th, 2009 at 10:31 pm «

    I have seen this coming for years. I am one of the fortunate ones, I was educated during the Truman through Ike years. We were taught Science, Civics, Language, History and we didn’t have to take some test written by some doofus in Texas. I knew that back in the early 50′s that there would be no college for me, but I also knew that I could join the US Military and get a good education and be paid for going to school at the same time. I have never stopped studying and learning and I am 71 years old, I still study Computer Science, Electronics, History, and Civics. Geography has always been something I loved and having lived in many of he pacific rim countries, I got to know the people close up and personal. I loved exchanging ideas and culture with all and I still do. I have become a citizen of a French Territory and by doing so am now a Naturalized French Citizen. My children are literate, my daughter is a staff member of the largest hospital outside of the island of Tahiti. She reads, writes, and speaks three languages, most of our people do. I would stack any of our graduates against 90% of the americans graduating from your schools today and gaurentee that ours would best yours practically every time and in every subject. A little story comes to mind of a family who lived on a small island next to ours and their children attended a tiny school in the country where there was only 4 rooms with each teacher teaching 2 grades. They moved back to the USA as they wanted their children to attend high school and college in the USA. Upon entering the school system in the USA, one child was advanced 3 grade levels and the other advanced 2 grade levels. Both graduated from college before they were 17 and they returned to the islands to attend the lycee here and graduate from it and then on to college in Papeete. I talked to them about their experience and they both felt that americans were lazy and slothful and had no desire to better themselves, or understand much of anything outside their sphere of interest.

    I saw this coming in the US Navy, and I spent a career as an enlisted man. I found that many of the technicians who were coming in during the early 70′s were only there to be “soldiers of God” (their term, not mine). I knew that my time had come when I saw open prayer meetings and other religious practices being openly practiced on government time and in spaces not designated for such things.

    I see the bigotry and selfishness of the right wing religious kooks being manifested today and the discipline going down the drain, and am thankful for the fact that I lived and worked in a age where education was prized and teachers felt that their professions were more of a calling than a job..

    Personally, I don’t think that the USA will ever be back to the place it was in the 50′s and 60′s, I realize that those weren’t really great years due to bigotry and racism. But the years today are going to drown you in ignorance and that will be the end of the country of my birth….

    I cry for what might have been, only to realize that too many ignorant people have taken control and until you destroy the corporations and the right wing, and get the churches out of government, you will never even equal the level of a banana republic.

    Just this old chief’s 2 cents
• ubetchaiam October 12th, 2009 at 10:47 am «

  “I cry for what might have been, only to realize that too many ignorant people have taken control and until you destroy the corporations and the right wing, and get the churches out of government, you will never even equal the level of a banana republic.”——ME TOO.
• T-Bear October 12th, 2009 at 12:43 pm «

  Good fortune had it that my schooling was just after that time, when Sputnik I first blazed across cold October skies (and the classes for a few years following). After which came the deluge. What you say about levels of literacy is strikingly true. It is also the probable cause of the demise of maturity as well, not to mention the evisceration of Law by failure of critical thinking.
  There are no models of maturity for those growing up (probably since the 70′s when the last adults became objects of disrespect) to emulate. Since then, jejune became universal and coupled with the collapse of education, the society hasn’t produced any generation of mature adults, rather herds of juveniles, unaware of the deficit in their development. IIRC “The Lord of the Flies” is the cautionary tale addressing the condition. Both a Republic and a Democracy require involved control of adults. At the time of the founding this was assured by the requirements of landholding, a sure sign of maturity then. Since suffrage became universal, the requirements of maturity have become lost to practice. The ignorant, believing children now run the asylum and this will not turn out well. Your prescription has merit.
• bluebutterfly October 12th, 2009 at 12:53 pm «

  I was not aware that the soldier of god movement started so long ago. Was it from the top down as it is now, or a movement started by the lower ranks?
  ******
  “Professor Noam Chomsky may be among America’s most enduring anti-war activists. But the leftist intellectual’s anthology of post 9/11 commentary is taboo at Guantánamo’s prison camp library, which offers books and videos on Harry Potter, World Cup soccer and Islam.

  U.S. military censors recently rejected a Pentagon lawyer’s donation of an Arabic-language copy of the political activist and linguistic professor’s 2007 anthology Interventions for the library, which has more than 16,000 items.

  Chomsky, 80, who has been voicing disgust with U.S. foreign policy since the Vietnam War, reacted with irritation and derision. “This happens sometimes in totalitarian regimes,” he told The Miami Herald by e-mail after learning of the decision.

  “Of some incidental interest, perhaps, is the nature of the book they banned. It consists of op-eds written for The New York Times syndicate and distributed by them. The subversive rot must run very deep.” ”

  http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/guantanamo/story/1275646.html
13. bluebutterfly October 12th, 2009 at 1:57 pm «

    If you read nothing else, read page 67.
    ***********

    “Underground History of American Education

    explains the history of the deliberate dumbing down of America

    Pdf_16x16 440 Pages ”

    http://www.scribd.com/doc/6266232/Underground-History-of-American-Education