The NALS was distressing when I first read the report in 1993…
…and it’s no more encouraging today. (Relax. You only think you know where I’m going. 🙂
Private correspondence with Rich (The English Guy) stemming from the bibliophilic meme* led me to think on literacy in general again.
I have what some might consider an idiosyncratic view of literacy. Perhaps I should define terms before going any further. Here’s a spectrum of definitions for the word “literate” as offered by the Random house Unabridged Dictionary:
1. able to read and write.
2. having or showing knowledge of literature, writing, etc.; literary; well-read.
3. characterized by skill, lucidity, polish, or the like: His writing is literate but cold and clinical.
4. having knowledge or skill in a specified field: literate in computer usage.
5. having an education; educated
OK. When most people talk about being literate, it’s my experience that they center in only on the first definition given. Well and good. That a person be able to decode the printed page and write words themselves is no mean accomplishment when set against most of human history of the past seven thousand years or so. (Or against the 80% to 90% illiteracy—in the sense of the first meaning—of today’s Muslim societies.)
The next step, it seems to me is for the person who is able to decode/encode printed words to actually be able to understand what is encoded/decoded. And it is at that stage that the 1992 NALS begins to reveal a disturbing set of information about America society.
A simple (all-too-brief) digest of the survey can be found here, and reveals, among other things that
- 21 to 23% – or some 40 to 44 million of the 191 million adults in the United States – demonstrated skills in the lowest level of prose, document, and quantitative literacy proficiencies (NALS literacy Level 1). For example, they were able to total an entry on a deposit slip, locate the time and place of a meeting on a form, and identify a piece of specific information in a brief news article. Others were unable to perform these types of tasks, and some had such limited skills that they were unable to respond to much of the survey.
- 25 to 28% of NALS respondents, representing about 50 million adults nationwide, demonstrated skills in proficiency Level 2 on each of the literacy scales. For example, adults in this level were able to calculate the cost of a purchase or determine the difference between two items. They could also locate a particular intersection on a street map and enter background information on a simple form.
- Nearly one-third of NALS respondents, or about 61 million adults nationwide, demonstrated performance in Level 3 on each of the literacy scales. Respondents performing in this level were able to integrate information from relatively long or dense text or from documents, to determine appropriate arithmetic operation based on information contained in the directive, and to identify the quantities needed to perform the operation.
- 18 to 21% of NALS respondents, or 34 to 40 million adults, performed in the two highest levels of prose, document, and quantitative literacy (Levels 4 and 5). These adults demonstrated proficiencies associated with the most challenging tasks in this assessment, many of which involved long and complex documents and text passages.
Now, that’s disturbing. Nearly a quarter of the survey sample of adult Americansdunction at a level of “literacy” so low as to make the word “literacy” apply turns the word into a contranym. What makes this brief precis even more disturbing is that the “Nearly one-third of NALS respondents, or about 61 million adults nationwide [who] demonstrated performance in Level 3 on each of the literacy scales” were actually offered word problems in maths, etc., that would have been child’s play for a third grader during my elementary school years. Simple addition and subtraction. Simple multiplication and division (what? You didn’t learn your multiplication tables in third grade? Blame a teacher… or an administrator.. ). Simple stuff. Early gradeschool stuff.
And that qualified as being “able to integrate information from relatively long or dense text or from documents, to determine appropriate arithmetic operation based on information contained in the directive, and to identify the quantities needed to perform the operation.” “…relatively long and dense” compared to what?!?!?
Oh, there’s more. Much more. And it’s almost all bad news.
And the terrible thing is, the survey does not even consider the kind of literacy that’s important to the survival of America as, well, America.
Let me back up a step and give an illustration of the kind of literacy I mean. My paternal grandfather is my model of what E.D. Hirsch has called cultural literacy. He grew up on a ranch in west Texas that his parents had established as emigrants from Virginia in the 1880s. His primary and secondary schooling amounted to part-time schooling in a one-room schoolhouse mostly six months out of the year. He was the first of his family of 9 brothers and three (?) sisters to attend college. He could quote from memory whole plays, epic poems, etc. His knowledge of the Bible, Shakespeare, the historyof Western Civilization, etc., was almost encyclopedic.
He could rope a steer, shoot a deer, drive a straight nail, saw a clean kerf, sharpen his own tools, and hold his own in intelligent converation on any subject.
It was just the way he was raised.
By the standard my paternal gransfather set, I am subliterate.
And so, most likely, are you.
We are in a boat that’s leaking and I fear we lack the tools to bail it out quickly enough to keep it afloat. Or rather, I fear we lack enough people who have the tools to both bail it out and make repairs so that it can stay afloat.
That boat is the civilization that gave us its highest achievement in the American State Papers—the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederacy and the Constitution. The tools are the cultural literacy that is necessary to appreciate and understand and protect and preserve the liberties those documents were written to proclaim and preserve.
When we have a man as smart as Antonin Scalia who is unable or unwilling (along with five others on the SCOTUS) to protect and defend the Constitution against corruption (utter vitiation, actually) of the 10th Amendment (ref: the “marijuana” decision so much in the buzz of late), then we may well have reached a tipping point where understanding of whence we came is so weak in the face of the growing assault on our essential liberties that we may be unable to prevent the ultimate demise of the United States along the lines of the demise of the Roman republic.
We need an army of Americans who will read. Read history; read literature until that army of readers understands the liberties that are ours by right and what the assaults upon them truly are. Then they will be able to write and speak and stand for those much maligned and neglected words from a passé world:
Truth
Justice
and
The American Way
No, we don’t need some yahoo in a blue suit and a red cape. We need real soldiers for the truth to stand against the Army of Darkness found in the unholy alliances of the Mass Media Podpeople’s Army, the Loony Left Moonbat brigade and all members of the Federal, State and local governments—legislative, executive and judiciary—who seek power for the collective over rights and powers residing in the People.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Addendum: peripherally related—some good sense about ability to function, as opposed to LLMB doctrine:
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/intel/index.html
h/t Jerry Pournelle’s Chaos Manor in Perspective
*”meme”—I’d like to see something else used for this word in such lil tag exercises. As Inigo said to Vizzini,
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
It’d work for me. I’d buy tickets to watch a buncha misogynist Muslim mullahs rioting over the “desecration” of 
But here’s where the AP blue-staters show their disconnect from flyover country. Note the lede, “a disagreement over a frozen snack”? The body of the AP story reveals the “frozen snack” to be something any normal person recognize (though with revulsion for some of us, including me) as a product of Hostess snacks, a pink coconut covered marshmallow/chocolate cake snack. Comes in packages of two (hence, no extra snack cake for junior). Tastes nasty, but some folks like nasty.