Declining Literacy in America’s Graduates
For anyone who has been teaching at the college level in the U.S. for any significant amount of time, yesterday’s report in the New York Times describing the decline of literacy in the United States would be of no surprise. Over 10 years ago I first became alarmed at the poor writing skills of some of my graduate students: students who I knew to be quite bright and, until I saw the first drafts of their theses, I had presumed to have acquired basic writing skills in high school and college.
The newly released National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) just shows how “far” we have come in the last 10 years.
The Assessment shows a 25 percent drop-off in reading proficiency on the part of college graduates since 1992, with only 31 percent of those classified as “formally educated” attaining what is deemed a high level of decoding text. While there is some good news (modest literacy gains among African-Americans and Asian-Americans), we must face up to the fact that some 40 million American adults (as the Christian Science Monitor put it) “can’t read much beyond ‘See Spot run.”
Researchers involved in these studies continue to repeat what we have heard before: less reading and more watching television and surfing the Internet is helping to facilitate the decline in literacy of our college graduates.
The implications of decreasing literacy competencies for our college graduates are great:
- individuals who have below basic English literacy skills are more likely to be unemployed than individuals in the intermediate and proficient literacy categories.
- there is a $28,000 difference in the annual earnings of a below basic reader and a proficient reader
Literacy experts also point out that the low U.S. literacy rates cost the nation “tens of billions of dollars” a year while harming the county’s economic competitiveness.
The economic impact of adult functional illiteracy in the United States reverberates throughout the country’s economy:
- two-thirds to three-quarters of adults receiving public assistance exhibit the lowest levels of literacy,
- the average health care cost for adults with low literacy skills was four times the amount of the average American,
- the United States’ prison population has tripled since 1980 and seventy percent of those inmates are either functionally illiterate or read below the eighth grade level,
- U.S. business and industry leaders estimate spending an average of $600 million per year on remedial reading, writing, and math skills training for employees.
Poor literacy is having a direct impact on the American job market. Last summer Toyota Motors chose to build its newest North American manufacturing plant, with 1,300 jobs, in Canada despite the fact that several U.S. states offered Toyota more than double the Canadian incentives.
Why did Toyota choose Canada rather than the Uniterd States?
- The president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers Association said that “Toyota hoped to avoid the expensive training faced by Nissan and Honda, which had to use pictorials when training workers to use high-tech equipment in their U.S. plants.”
Those of us working in American education systems have a big job and a big responsibility ahead of us. The stakes are nothing less the future stature and competitiveness of the United States.
Literacy can be defined as the dialog between text and context, not simply the act of pronouncing words. For such a dialog to exist authentic thinking must be involved. Indeed, proficiency in both verbal and mathematical language is essential for effective thought; as goes language, so goes thinking. If so many college graduates (and even graduate students!) are illiterate (insofar as the tests show) that implies that they are (big surprise) to the same degree devoid of the rational thought required for effective verbal and logico-mathematical comprehension. They can barely understand the 15-second sound bite (unless it’s a commercial), let alone a college textbook. And, sadly, many of them are registered to vote.
Despite the statistics, there is obviously no real accountability in American society for being “illiterate.” Not with the individual; not with the schools. If the low US literacy rate (especially that among high school and college graduates) costs the nation “tens of billions of dollars” per year, why don’t we end up in the red? No, somehow we actually net tens of billions more. When US business and industry leaders spend “an agerage of $600 million per year on remedial reading, writing and math skills training for employees”, this just feeds a compensatory industry that generates far more than that. It’s like an environmental disaster that increases theGDP through the now well-developed mitigation industry.
As a college professor who has devoted a lifetime to what I believe is genuine education, I’m appalled. Education in this country has become, de facto, the handmaiden of unbridled material consumption. Most of our “education” dollar goes to commercial advertising aimed at bypassing rational thought, hence aimed at the illiterate. For the most part, our schools are intellectually bankrupt. If we really wanted to solve the illiteracy problem, we’d close all the college and university schools of education tomorrow and start over. But then, what’s really important?