According to a recent study by the U.S. Department of Education, almost half the adults in America have trouble making sense of a simple magazine article, interpreting a bus schedule or using a chart to find the proper kind of sandpaper for wood. They cannot even write a letter explaining that an error has been made on a credit card bill.
This works out to as many as 90 million adults who are considered to be barely literate.However, only 5 million of those are so dysfunctional that they cannot do much beyond locating the right restroom and signing their own names.
The Educational Testing Service studied 13,600 adults doing 165 tasks in the categories of prose, document and quantitative literacy. As to be expected, many of the lowest performers are recent immigrants.
Those who were judged in the lowest category are not necessarily illiterate in the technical sense. Rather, they have restricted reading skills that may keep them from taking advantages of opportunities in training and retraining.
In other words, they are not able to keep up and compete in a quickly-changing world.
What this means is quite simple. For most of this century, a person could succeed in life at a middle class status with an eighth-grade level of literacy. But those days are over.
Now, Third World countries are competing in the same markets as our own workers who may begin making Third World wages unless they start bringing a higher level of skills to the work place.
This study underlines the oft-repeated assertion by many educators that in this TV age, Americans are not a reading society.
If the country is to change, teachers have to send books home to be read, parents have to read those books to and with their children, and all people have to cultivate the art of reading as they grow older.
It is a lifetime commitment.