Literacy rates

I am currently taking an American history class in college. I was amazed to read that in the 1850 census, it was determined that New England had a 0.4% illiteracy rate among adults. Let’s look at illiteracy today, shall we?

Illiteracy this extensive is virtually unprecedented in America’s history. Eighty years ago, in 1910, only 2.2 percent of American children between the ages of ten and fourteen could neither read nor write. It is important to remember that the illiteracy of 1910 reflected for the most part children who never had the advantage of schooling. The illiterates of today, however, are not people who never went to school; they are, for the most part, individuals who have spent eight to twelve years in public schools.

Clearly incompetence of this magnitude is not the result of accident. A large part of the blame rests with the educational establishment itself, the very people and institutions entrusted with the task of educating America’s children.

There is a growing body of evidence that suggests that many of our public school teachers are themselves woefully under-educated. In 1983, for example, school teachers in Houston, Texas were required to take a competency test. More than 60 percent of the teachers failed the reading part of the test. Forty-six percent failed the math section while 26 percent could not pass the writing exam. As if this weren’t bad enough, 763 of the more than 3,000 teachers taking the test cheated.

How well can your kid read and write? Is he or she capable of expressing himself in terms the rest of us can understand?

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