Literacy: About More Than Reading & Jobs

Literacy is about a lot more than reading and jobsSan Francisco Chronicle: May 26, 2011 by Caille Millner

Recently I was invited to speak at a fundraiser for Jumpstart, a national nonprofit organization that focuses on developing literacy in low-income preschool children. Literacy is an important topic to me for many reasons. Americans are obsessed with educational budget cuts and government austerity right now, but the potential victims of all this big talk - a generation of under-educated children - could suffer in even larger ways than just their job prospects.

I was an unusual child in that I never got any instruction in literacy myself. That was because I taught myself to read at the age of 3. It was my only moment of genius, believe me.

But as it happens, I knew someone who spent his entire life without being literate. That person was my grandfather, who's now passed. There were so many things that my grandfather couldn't do, of course. Newspapers, novels, children's stories, letters. All things that I love.

He developed some pretty admirable ways to cope with these limitations - instead of spending the mornings with a newspaper, for instance, he'd spend the evenings with the radio. He asked other people to write down his letters - my mother did this for him a lot when she was a child.

But one of the important things about literacy is that it gives you a sense of life's possibilities beyond just survival.

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To get back to the idea of understanding life's possibilities through literacy - when you can read, you can read other people's stories. You can step into other people's lives, other people's existences. And when that happens, your own world expands. My grandfather, for example, never knew anything about the world outside of his own state, his own county, his own porch.

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So helping children become literate is our patriotic duty. They'll be better citizens, of course, because they can think critically and vote accordingly. They'll have richer and fuller personal lives because they can understand other people. And they'll be able to participate in the life of this country in a way that's constructive, positive and informed. READ MORE !