America the Not so Great: US Literacy Rates Below 3rd World Levels

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The US educational system has failed at doing its job. If someone is to be schooled, the first and main principal they are taught is how to read and write. Literacy being the most important aspect of education, it is hard to believe that the US is doing a worse job at this than Sri Lanka.

In an article titled, The U.S. Illiteracy Rate Hasn’t Changed In 10 Years, Huffington post editors gave the alarming facts. "According to a study conducted in late April by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy, 32 million adults in the U.S. can’t read. That’s 14 percent of the population. 21 percent of adults in the U.S. read below a 5th grade level, and 19 percent of high school graduates can’t read "(Huffington post, The U.S. Illiteracy). Reading below a fifth grade level entails that 21% of adults could not make a decision based off of their own research. This could apply to an issue such as climate changein which scientific words are often used. 21% of adults would not quite understand what the scientist was saying, and 32 million more would not know which language it was in.

Not only is that alarming, but it seems that nothing has been done to change this. Editors go on to explain how,"Th current literacy rate isn’t any better than it was 10 years ago. According to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy"(Huffington post, The U.S. Illiteracy).

So why is this happening? Why is the US lacking behind the world when it comes to the most important aspect of education? John Taylor Gatto explains the problem in his book Weapons of Mass Instruction. "Data from nearly all-black Jamaica for the year 2004 shows the literacy rate there at 98.5 percent, considerably higher than the 2005 American rate for whites - 83 percent. What might explain the sharp decline in literacy among blacks, if not bad biology~ Consider this: during WWII, American public schools - first in urban areas, then everywhere - were converted from phonetic ways of instruction (the ancient "alphabet system") to non-phonetic methods which involved memorizing whole word units, and lots of guessing for unfamiliar words. Whites had been learning to read at home for 300 years the old-fashioned way - matching spoken sounds to written letters - and white homes preserved this tool even when schools left it behind. There was a resource available to whites which hardly existed for blacks. During slavery, blacks had been forbidden to learn to read; as late as 1930 they averaged only three to four years of schooling. When teachers stopped teaching a phonetic system - known to work - blacks had no fallback position." Not only this, but not every american house hold had a back up for when the schools stopped teaching in a phonetic way, which would grow in number by generation.