Jerry Pournelle notes:
Civilization is more fragile than most believe. Note that a true dark age comes not when we lose the ability to do something, but forget that we ever had that ability: as for instance no university Department of Education seems aware that in the 1930’s to the end of World War II, essentially the only adult illiterates in the United States were people who had never been to school to begin with (see the Army’s tests of conscripts). My mother had a 2-year Normal School degree and taught first grade in rural Florida, not considered a high intelligence population. I once asked her if any of her students left first grade without learning to read. She said, “Well, there were a few, but they didn’t learn anything else, either.” The notion that a child could get out of elementary school unable to read was simply shocking up to about 1950 when new University Education Department theories of reading emerged. Now a majority of students read “below grade level”…
Oh, it’s far worse than that, Dr. Pournelle, if the results of the Adult Literacy Survey of 2003 aren’t reversed soon:
Literacy experts and educators say they are stunned by the results of a recent adult literacy assessment, which shows that the reading proficiency of college graduates has declined in the past decade, with no obvious explanation…
The test measures how well adults comprehend basic instructions and tasks through reading — such as computing costs per ounce of food items, comparing viewpoints on two editorials and reading prescription labels. Only 41 percent of graduate students tested in 2003 could be classified as “proficient” in prose — reading and understanding information in short texts — down 10 percentage points since 1992. Of college graduates, only 31 percent were classified as proficient — compared with 40 percent in 1992.
Do note the simplicity of the tasks tested. Other text samples in the test were extracts from a bus schedule, a newspaper editorial and a prescription med label, all of which proved too daunting for an overwhelming majority of college graduates.
With a basic reading skill set like this, is it any wonder that the ISI’s survey of civics literacy indicates such a abysmal grasp of basic civics in our adult population–most especially in college graduates?
More interesting, although I have posted similar posts for five years or so now, I have yet to read a defense of public education here–even when my traffic was regularly in quadruple digits several years ago–that was… literate.
See “The National Assessment of Adult Literacy” (PDF file) for more–especially if the background data is still available (I didn’t check, but sometimes such things are… redacted, shall we say, to be less embarrassing when the actual data isn’t as rosy as the particular government department wishes to portray. If such proves to be the case, I may be able to find a copy of what I read several years ago.)
Addendum: I debated using this linked info in my comments above but decided against it because of the subliterate use of terms I found in it, for example, “Over all [sic], the average prose and document literacy scores for Americans were basically flat between 1992 and 2003… ” The proper term for discussing the limits of the scores between the denoted boundaries of “1992-2003” is “overall” not “over all”. *sigh* But still, I find the following paragraph delicious:
Based on their scores, participants in the survey were deemed to have “basic,” “intermediate” or “proficient” literacy (Whitehurst noted that a National Research Council committee that recommended the literacy levels initially called the highest level “advanced,” but that department officials ultimately concluded that the skills required for that category — comparing viewpoints in two editorials, for instance, or calculating the cost per ounce of different grocery items — weren’t really all that advanced.)
“[W]eren’t really all that advanced”? Indeed. And that’s the level that only 31% reached. Barely above mouth-breathers who’ve been chemically lobotomized.