Made In America - Bill Bryson [225]
In fact, no one knows how many Americans are illiterate. Defining literacy is a complicated matter. The US Department of Education divides literacy into three categories – prose literacy (as in books and newspapers), document literacy (as on order forms and tax returns) and quantitative literacy (involving the sort of mathematical skills necessary to calculate a 15 per cent tip, say) – and further breaks down each category into four levels, thus giving Americans twelve quite distinct ways in which to be literate or not. At the simplest level of prose literacy, according to the department’s criteria, a person should be able to write a simple declarative sentence describing the kind of job he or she wants. On this basis, 96.1 per cent of adult Americans are literate – a creditable, if not especially outstanding, performance compared with other nations. But at a slightly more demanding level of prose literacy – being able to read a leading article in a newspaper and briefly summarize its contents – the level of reading competence in America falls to 78.9 per cent. Put another way, slightly more than one American adult in five cannot read a newspaper effectively.2
By even the most conservative estimates, America has at least twenty million adults who cannot read well enough to understand the instructions on a medicine bottle or add and subtract with sufficient competence to tally a cheque-book.3 Probably the figure is much worse. Noting a ‘national tendency to graduate anyone who occupies a desk long enough’, the journalist Jonathan Maslow quotes a woman in Jackson, Mississippi, who told him: ‘I went through twelve years of school and two years of community college without ever learning to read, and passed with flying colours.’4
Signs of a national failure to educate students to even a basic level are not hard to find. In Mississippi, almost half of the adults do not have a high school diploma. One-third of the people in Kentucky aged twenty-five or older are functionally illiterate.5 Throughout the country, large employers like Ford, Motorola and IBM routinely spend huge sums teaching their workers the basic skills that schools failed to impart. Just among private employers, the market for remedial reading textbooks is worth $750 million a year6 – good news for publishers, but hardly a source of pride for anyone else.
Any number of culprits have been cited for this national embarrassment. Some have blamed the shortness of American school days (six hours on average) and school years (175 to 180 days – only slightly shorter than England and Wales with 190).7 Others blame the states for neglecting the central role of education. In contrast to most other countries, public education is not the preserve of central government in the US. Standards of attainment and levels of funding are set by each state, and many, particularly in the deep South, have historically shown a less than wholehearted commitment to raising the levels of either. Until as recently as 1982 in Mississippi school attendance was not even mandatory. Previously each year up to six thousand children in Mississippi did not bother to start school.8
Still others attribute the decline in learning to a lack of encouragement and attention at home, as parents increasingly have become absent through work or divorce. The economist Victor Fuchs has calculated that parents in