Widespread English Illiteracy Hurts Everyone: How to End It Now
Posted: Monday, October 12, 2009
by Bob Cleckler
Literacy Research Assoc., Inc.
At long last, Tom and Amy moved into their own apartment. They previously lived in a homeless shelter which consisted of cots in a large open room. Their three-year-old son could find no place to play and was considered a nuisance by the others at the shelter. Their new apartment was the only low-rent apartment in the area and was barely within their ability to pay because of Tom's low-wage job. One very cold January day, only one year after moving in, the apartment owner gave them an eviction notice. He said the crying of their new baby disturbed the others in the apartment house, a forbidden act in their rental contract. The rental contract did not really mentioned this. The apartment owner planned to improve the apartment and charge an amount he knew that Tom and Amy could not afford. Neither Tom nor Amy could read, and they did not dare challenge the apartment owner fearing exposure of their illiteracy to several of the friends they had made at the apartment house. Instead, they meekly gathered up their meager belongings and moved back into the homeless shelter.
The most accurate study of United States illiteracy of adults ever commissioned by the U.S. government, statistically balanced to represent the entire U.S. population, (search for the 1993 report "Adult Literacy in America" for shocking illiteracy statistics) shows that 31.2 percent of the two least literate of the five literacy groups determined in the study were in poverty. Only 10.1 percent of the three most literate groups were in poverty. Since the only provable differences between the two groupings was their literacy level, this strongly indicates that the least literate groups were at least twice as likely to live in poverty as a result of their illiteracy as for all other reasons combined.
Shockingly, the two least literate groups amounted to 48.7 percent of U.S. adults. We do not see 48.7 percent of U.S. adults in poverty because most households have more than one employed adult and because low-income households receive financial assistance from the government (from our taxes) and from family, friends, and charities. The report of a study done by the same group who did the above 1993 study came out in 2006 showing no statistically significant improvement over the 1993 results.
According to a 2009 study by the management consulting firm McKinsey & Co., the gap between the academic achievement levels for the U.S. and better-performing nations knocked as much as $2.3 trillion off the gross domestic product of the U.S. in 2008. Thomas Friedman's book, The World is Flat , details many ways in which previously American jobs are now going overseas; more literate workers in other nations makes the competition for jobs much more serious for the U.S. Almost every U.S. company must interview several candidates for a job before a suitable employee can be found and then spend more than normal costs for training functionally illiterate workers. Functional illiteracy eliminates many from consideration.
Benefits of Ending Illiteracy
- You will benefit emotionally if you become concerned about the functional illiteracy of people you know and love.
- You will benefit if you object to an average personal cost of $5186 each year as a result of illiteracy for (1) taxes for government programs that illiterates use and for the truancy, juvenile delinquency, and crime directly related to illiteracy and (2) higher prices for consumer goods due to illiterates in the workplace.
- You will benefit if you accept employment by -- or maintain financial interests in -- a business or organization in which you invest time or money. Illiteracy affects all organizations to some extent, some of them seriously.
- You will benefit if our nation improves the trade balance, national relationships, and our national employment by improving communication between nations.
Linguists tell us that Dr. Johnson made a very serious linguistic error in preparing his dictionary in 1755. Instead of freezing the spelling of the sounds of the English language, he froze the spelling of words . Present-day English is thus based upon the spelling of words from the languages of eight nations who occupied the British Isles before 1755 and "borrowed" words (and usually their spelling) from 350 other languages since then.
Professor Julius Nyikos found 1768 ways of spelling forty sounds in English! There's not even one invariable spelling rule in English -- some of the exceptions have exceptions! As a result, every word in a person's vocabulary must be learned, one at a time, either by rote memory or by repeated use.
The obvious solution: spell our words the way they sound, as the rest of alphabetic languages of the world do! Students of the revolutionary spelling system, NuEnglish, only need to learn the spelling of 38 sounds instead of all 20,000 or more words in their reading vocabulary. It is so simple that present readers of English can learn NuEnglish spelling in about five minutes. With the exception of the most seriously mentally handicapped, NuEnglish can be learned in as little as a week to as much as three months by all five-years-old or older beginning readers .
Like U.S. illiteracy, world illiteracy of English-speaking people is also much worse than you may realize. Adoption of NuEnglish will enable about 600 million of the 1.3 billion people around the world who speak English but cannot read it very well -- over 93 million in the U.S. alone -- to learn to read English in less than three months. Without adoption of NuEnglish, based upon present statistics, less than two percent of U.S. adult illiterates will ever become fluent readers.
Consider these facts about spelling reform:
- Dozens of scholars for over 250 years have recommended it.
- Several nations, smaller and larger than the U.S., both advanced and third-world, have simplified their spelling.
- A simpler spelling system has been proven effective for making learning to read easier in more than 300 alphabetic languages -- but never tried in English. In 295 languages (at least 98% of them) students become fluent readers in less than three months . Most of the approx. 51 percent of U.S. adults who do become functionally literate require two to four years .
- Several distinguished linguists and educators have thoroughly debunked all reasonable objections to spelling reform.
- The need is greater than ever in our increasingly complex world, and with improvements due to computer technology the change will be easier than ever, but it remains untried in English.
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