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Crisis Point: The State of Literacy in America
Education
CU Portland:
3.05.2018 by The Room 241 Team
The
United States is facing a literacy crisis. Yes, crisis. It isn’t new, but its
impact upon our kids, our economy, and our society are far-reaching and
expanding. How bad is it? =Take a look at some numbers.
➤More
than 30 million adults in the United States cannot read, write, or do basic
math above a third grade level. — ProLiteracy
➤Children
whose parents have low literacy levels have a 72 percent chance of being at the
lowest reading levels themselves. These children are more likely to get poor
grades, display behavioral problems, have high absentee rates, repeat school
years, or drop out. — National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
➤75
percent of state prison inmates did not complete high school or can be classified
as low literate. — Rand Report: Evaluating the Effectiveness of
Correctional Education
➤Low
literacy is said to be connected to over $230 billion a year in health care
costs because almost half of Americans cannot read well enough to comprehend
health information, incurring higher costs. — American Journal of Public
Health
The
history of American literacy
To
truly understand the state of literacy in today’s United States, we
need to go back to the beginning. Literacy has long been used as a method of
social control and oppression. Throughout much of history, the ability to read
was something only privileged, upper-class white men were allowed to learn.
School wasn’t free like it is today. Education was provided to only a select
few, and this preserved a class system that kept the poor powerless and the
rich powerful—a practice, we’ll see later in this piece, that continues today.
According
to the Smithsonian, after the slave revolt of 1831, all slave states except
Maryland, Kentucky, and Tennessee passed laws that made it illegal to teach
slaves to read and write. The Alabama Slave Code of 1833 included this
following law: “Any person who shall attempt to teach any free person of color,
or slave, to spell, read or write, shall upon conviction thereof by indictment,
be fined in a sum of not less than two hundred fifty dollars, nor more than
five hundred dollars.” That was a whole lot of money in 1833. Why were they so
concerned about slaves learning to read? Because if slaves learned to read,
they could access information. They could read newspapers. They could read
books and understand their rights. They could organize and rise up against the
institution of slavery. Slave owners wanted to keep their slaves uneducated and
powerless because they understood that literacy represents power.
A
prime example is former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass who learned
the alphabet secretly as a child from his slave master’s wife, Sophia Auld. As
a young adult, Douglass pursued learning on his own, secretly reading books and
newspapers. He famously said that “once you learn to read, you will be forever
free.”
Schools
+ learning to read
In
the 17th century, public schools existed in the New England states, but largely
taught students about religion and family. It wasn’t until the 19th century
that public schools truly focused on academics. In the South, public schools
were slower to arrive. Rich people paid private tutors to educate their
children in the southern states, relegating the poor to perpetual
disenfranchisement. The main author of the Declaration of Independence and
third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, created a bill in early
Virginia (in the 1770s), titled “A Bill for the More General Diffusion of
Knowledge.” His bill proposed that public schools should be started in Virginia
to teach basic “reading, writing, and common arithmetic” to “all the free
children, male and female.”
This
did not, however, include slaves. His bill was not passed, nor was any public
school law in Virginia until decades later in 1796. The 19th and 20th centuries
saw the most growth in education and popular literacy. We then saw steady
increases in literacy rates until the 1980s—when rates began to dip slightly.
Female
literacy
Women,
too, were largely left out of education. Educating women simply was not a
priority until the early 1900s and even then, women attending college was rare
up until the 1960s. Early Americans often believed it was a waste to educate
women past the basics since they would need to run a home and raise a family.
Bard College’s Joel Perlmann and Boston College’s Dennis Shirley say that “half
the women born around 1730 were illiterate.” Women might have been taught to
read at home or in an early girl’s school, but they largely weren’t taught to
write, and often didn’t have access to secondary school in the early American
colonies and states.
Literacy
as a social justice issue
Think
about it: When someone cannot read, they are excluded from many of the things
that allow us to be fully functional citizens with choices. Those who are
illiterate can lack access to information, are excluded from making choices
about their rights or government through voting, and have less opportunities
for employment. Illiteracy keeps people trapped in a cycle of poverty and
subjugation, limiting life choices and making it difficult to achieve social
mobility. Literacy truly is power—power over one’s own life.
While
today’s American public schools are compulsory and free to attend, and we now
have things like television and the internet, reading still remains a critical
pathway to freedom. READ
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