by Sean Griobhtha and Rubicon & Mrs Rubicon
The shares of American 9- and 13-year-olds who say they read for fun on an almost daily basis have dropped from nearly a decade ago and are at the lowest levels since at least the mid-1980s, according to a survey conducted in late 2019 and early 2020 by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
Substack is not just about writers, it’s about artists as well, but writing and reading are the overarching products of Substack, from articles, to book excerpts, to excellent poetry, to political cartoonists and meme makers putting a thousand words into pictures; and all these things are interelated, but the greatest of these are reading and writing. The following should be worrisome to writers, readers, parents, government employees, teachers, etc…
According to research performed over time with UNESCO, ProLiteracy (an international literacy volunteer organization based in the US), Literacy Volunteers of America, and National Dyslexia Institute, 25% of Americans are functionally illiterate. Further, “more than 48 million adults in the United States cannot read, write, or do basic math above a third grade level”.
Bringing all adults to the equivalent of a sixth-grade reading level would generate an additional $2.2 trillion in annual income for the country.3
It is estimated between $106–$238 billion in health care costs a year are linked to low adult literacy skills.4
51% of ProLiteracy member programs put students on a waiting list due to demand exceeding program capacity.2
75% of state incarcerated individuals did not complete high school or can be classified as low literate.10
Incarcerated individuals who participate in correctional education programs are 43% less likely to recidivate than inmates who do not.11
A mother’s reading skill is the greatest determinant of her children’s future academic success, outweighing other factors, such as neighborhood and family income.9
Illiteracy leads to higher levels of disease states among adults.
According to the recent literacy rate, 85% of the adult population in the world is literate, and therefore worldwide about 757 million people are illiterate (UNESCO, 2015). Large-scale assessments measuring literacy skills indicate that in developing countries, illiteracy is more prevalent, while in developed countries, functional illiteracy is more prevalent (Bhola, 1995, p. 18). According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), literacy is defined as follows:
“Literacy is defined as the ability to understand, evaluate, use, and engage with written texts to participate in society, achieve one’s goals, and develop one’s knowledge and potential (OECD, 2013, p. 59).” More detailed, find other institutions, e.g., UNESCO.
This is disturbing in more than a present sense; for the US this is disturbing in an historical sense. In 1955 Rudolf Flesch wrote an expose of an illiteracy epidemic, Why Johnny Can’t Read, And What You Can Do About It. This book is still in print. His program and the program Recipe For Reading’s phonetic method is similar to Orton-Gillingham which is used by Dyslexia Institutes across the country.
In 1835 -1840, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote Democracy In America. He was smitten with our Constitution, and while he was completely wrong about the rich coming into government, he detailed the character of regular Americans as being overly and blindly patriotic, and prone to illiteracy and ignorance. We have always had a population woefully unprepared to read and comprehend our own Constitution.
A man like the one in the picture doesn’t bode well for society or the social fabric or the Social Contract. People make a lot of fun with this picture, but the sadness it represents is reflected throughout American society. It also means that the functionally illiterate survive by having the world read to them and opined to them through other functional illiterates, which includes many journalists, reporters, and video Yakkos. An essential question to ask yourself is, “How do people who can’t or won’t read history learn that violent rebellion is a many splendored thing, or that slavery is a legitimate human function, or that elevating your own rights and privileges by suppressing those of others is a proper attitude and thought process?” Who’s teaching these people that atrocity is unimportant and subjugation is legitimate? Who’s teaching them that power is the most important thing? They don’t get it from reading; they get it from being read to by charlatans.
Dyslexics have a legitimate gripe, but not an excuse. Non-dyslexics have no reasoning at all, they’re just lazy when it comes to learning. Parents are the first line of failure in illiteracy. Yet, I’ve also heard teachers excuse students saying, “They shouldn’t have to read hard things”. I’ve heard other teachers say, “I don’t want to read”.
Reading falls off dramatically after high school, and even more after college. AI for writing original material is NOT a solution; it smacks of the child who has a willing mother or father or AI to read everything to them even into college; and then write their paper for them. My wife and I knew a dyslexic student who did this his entire life (until he died in an auto accident related to diabetes). He refused to participate in tutoring, and he lost a tutoring scholarship from the Michigan Dyslexia Institute. Writing needs to be taught at the same time as reading. Kinesthetics (in tutoring, from brain (sight, sound, touch) to hand and paper) reinforces correct reading ability. Utilizing AI for writing original material is a prescription for de-evolution. It’s especially disconcerting that media organizations, including MLive, have begun embracing AI to write; journalism across the country has been increasingly worse for decades from following journalism school dictates to ditch compound sentences and write with the object of being terse; this may have made a modicum of sense in the days of limited newspaper space, but it makes no sense at all now. MLive and its batch of previous paper reporters couldn’t write complete or correct wording and sentences before MLive (John Hiner) announced the wonderful world of AI for writing their “stories” (I just use them for example, as news organizations around the country are embracing this ill-fated plan).
In the State of Michigan, there was a requirement that children in elementary schools must be at reading level to pass out of third grade. However, that requirement was scrapped because so many children couldn’t, and in the shopping for education environment of School Of Choice, parents just shifted their children to another school. Hence, we’re back to 1955 and 1835.
“So far, we have talked about literacy. However, many people do not achieve literacy because of inadequate schooling or even despite adequate schooling. On 1949, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) set the generalized functionality of literacy. The acquisition of reading and writing was regarded as basic rights: people should be enabled to become functionally literate in their own culture (Bhola, 1995). A need for a standard and a workable definition materialized to differentiate between literates and non-literates (illiterates) and also to distinguish various levels in between. The result of the demand was realized at the General Conference of the UNESCO in 1978:
“A person is literate who can with understanding both read and write a short simple statement on his everyday life.
A person is illiterate who cannot with understanding both read and write a short simple statement on his everyday life.
A person is functionally literate who can engage in all those activities in which literacy is required for effective functioning of his group and community and also for enabling him to continue to use reading, writing, and calculation for his own and the community’s development.
A person is functionally illiterate who cannot engage in all those activities in which literacy is required for effective functioning of his group and community and also for enabling him to continue to use reading, writing, and calculation for his own and the community’s development (UNESCO, 1978, p.183).”
“The difference between literate and illiterate people is explicit here: illiterates had never attended school and are unable to read or write even single words while literates can (Reis and Castro-Caldas, 1997).
“In contrast with literacy and illiteracy, the difference between functional illiteracy, literacy and illiteracy is not obvious enough. Functionality, which is the essence of the difference between these terms, was never operationally defined. Recently, the number of functional illiterates in Europe was estimated to be about 80 million, their proportion is lowest in Sweden with 8% and highest in Portugal with 40% (e.g., in Eme, 2011; Grotlüschen and Riekmann, 2011a). However, the frequently referred original International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) report does not imply functional illiteracy (OECD and Statistics Canada, 2000).”
A Review about Functional Illiteracy: Definition, Cognitive, Linguistic, and Numerical Aspects, Front Psychol. 2016; 7: 1617. Published online 2016 Nov 10. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01617; PMCID: PMC5102880; PMID: 27891100
Democracy requires literacy. Writers need literate readers. Readers need literate writers, Teachers need students willing to learn. We all need parents who teach their children that going through life without reading is no longer acceptable. As Donald Trump said, “I love the poorly educated”, and Joe Biden draws on this same idiocy.
There are more than 600,000 words in the English language; the average American adult uses less than 5,000; the average American child between the ages of 5-10 uses about 3,000; the average American politician uses four, “Yes, I am lofty”, or “I’m a proud Zionist”; the average university faculty uses three, “I don’t know”; the average student uses two, “I’m struggling”; the average University President uses one, “nnnnnnn”.
A graduate student joke from the ‘90s based upon research conducted by the Oxford English Dictionary.
Teaching reading in an alphabet based system should be the simplest task, versus teaching via whole word recognition:
All the reading books used in our schools, up through fourth and fifth and sixth grade, are collections of stuff like…
“We will look”, said Susan. “Yes, yes”, said all the children. “We will look and find it.” So all the boys and all the girls looked. They looked and looked for it. But they did not find it.
Or this,
“Quack, quack”, said the duck. He wanted something. He did not want to get out. He did not want to go to the farm. He did not want to eat. He sat and sat and sat.
Our children learn the word sat by reading over and over again about a duck or a pig or a goat that sat and sat and sat. And so with every word in the English language.
Every word in the English language! You know what that means? It means that if you teach reading by this system, you can’t use ordinary reading matter for practice. Instead, all children for three, four, five, six years have to work their way up through a battery of carefully designed readers, each one containing all the words used in the previous one plus a strictly limited number of new ones, used with the exactly “right” amount of repetition. Our children don’t read Anderson’s Fairy Tales any more or the Arabian Nights or Mark Twain or Louisa May Alcott or the Mary Poppins books or the Dr. Doolittle books or anything interesting or worth while, because they can’t. It so happens that the writers of these classic children’s books wrote without being aware of our Chinese system of teaching reading. So Little Women contains words like grieving and serene, and Tom Sawyer contains ague and inwardly, Bulfinch’s Age of Fable has nymph and deity and incantations. If a child who has gone to any of our schools faces the word nymph for the first time, he is absolutely helpless because nobody has ever told him how to sound out n and y and m and ph and read the word off the page.
So what does he get instead? He gets those series of horrible, stupid, emasculated, pointless, tasteless little readers, the stuff and guff about Dick and Jane or Alice and Jerry visiting the farm and having birthday parties and seeing animals in the zoo and going through dozens and dozens of of totally unexciting and middle-class, middle-income, middle-IQ children’s activities that offer opportunities for reading “Look, look” or “Yes, yes” or “Come, come” or “See the funny, funny animal”. During the past year I have read a good deal of this material and I don’t wish this experience on anyone… It is as nonsensical to use a whole word method for beginning reading as would be to teach the Morse code on a whole word basis… A child who has been taught the code and how to use it… gains a confident habit in attacking words.
(Rudolf Flesch; Why Johnny Can’t Read, and what you can do about it)
Reading starts out very simply; with an alphabetical code. The innate human need to communicate has evolved from oral tradition to the desire to preserve history, an idea, an experience so profound it must be recorded for our posterity. The first step is to create a basic shape to represent the sound coming from our mouths when we speak. Simple enough, right? If a child is taught that each letter has a sound (phoneme) corresponding to it, we are off to a good start. But wait, each letter also has a name (grapheme). Our first mistake in teaching children to read is teaching them to sing the ABC song. In the best of all possible worlds, we would teach children to sing the phonemes. With this simple shift, the connection between symbol and sound would be established quickly. Then for the convenience of instructing the patterns and combinations these sounds form, we can teach a child the graphemes. Ancient civilizations knew and practiced this simple sound to symbol instruction, with great success. Leave it to twentieth century Americans to complicate matters by introducing the whole word system to public education.
As a person with a dyslexic brain, I (MR) was completely lost in school as the whole word system became popular in the early 1970’s. There was no support for my burgeoning mind to make connections between the squiggle on the page and the sounds being produced in my “Dick and Jane” reader. Now, to be fair, I did pick up some words, but it was from matching the shapes of the letters with what others were reading. In the pre-literate mind of a child, we see everything in pictures, images. Hearing the word “cat” brings a four-legged, long tailed animal to our mind, not the letters c-a-t. Had I been taught the sounds printed on the page, I could have sounded out the word ‘cat’ swiftly and felt empowered to decode more words rather than working so hard to remember the shape of the word. And there was no link made without great effort and often tearful frustration to separate the letters to understand their sounds. My first grade teacher was ever so ready to call me stupid in front of my classmates when I mispronounced words, mistaking the word cat for cab. The emotional damage done to dyslexic children using the whole word system (I prefer whole word confusion to the term ‘system’) is reason enough to teach phonetic awareness straightaway in our schools!
As an Orton-Gillingham trained tutor for 24 years, I have witnessed way too many students coming to me emotionally broken and completely identifying with the deceptive belief that they are very stupid and unable to read and spell only because they were never given the correct tools to use. I understand this identity confusion because I experienced it myself deeply. It is a huge part of my instruction with my students to help them heal from the trauma of not being taught phonics. I know trauma is a strong term, but this points directly to the important and essential task of teaching children to read.
Learning anything is exciting and we are wired to do so from the very first moment we have to learn to suckle from the nipple in order to eat. There is nothing as rewarding as watching a student, whether it be a child of 7 years or an adult of 34, be empowered with the ability to connect with words; to relate to another human being through written language; to express themselves with great clarity because they can use the mechanics of their language. I have had many experiences where both my student and myself are brought to tears of joy because they are infused with the light of understanding for the first time.
Ramifications of illiteracy in a democracy
The illiterate, or the functionally illiterate, are unable to read the Constitution, much less comprehend it. They must rely on others, however nefarious those others may be, to read it to them or more likely to interpret it for them. They cannot understand the nefarious mechanations ascribed to their favorite candidate, because they cannot read nor comprehend the articles detailing their candidates words, including lies, obfuscations, and threats. They are unable to read history and are told to believe who our “enemies” are, and they do believe beause they cannot research the facts themselves; and hence, we’re back to Presidents trusting in the ignorance of the populace. They are told what the main issues are because they cannot discern these for themselves. They believe all socialists or communists are Stalin and Mao with no clue as to why those leaders arose; and they have no clue that capitalism has destroyed more lives than both put together, either through slavery or racism. Ignorance from being unable or unwilling to read history leads to repreated wars, atrocities, and callousness. Just as those like the man above who do not contribute to evolution and society, Presidents who rely on ignorance destroy society.
Empowerment. Higher function of reading. Empathy of stories. Enjoyment. Reading and writing are fundamental; fundamental to human evolution; fundamental to freedom and soul development; fundamental to democracy; fundamental to education and growth; fundamental to empathy and Love.
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Mrs Rubicon has been tutoring dyslexics and non-dyslexics in reading and writing for over three decades. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Interdisciplinary Humanities, and a Master’s degree in Pastoral Care and Psychology. She completed Pastoral Care training at the University of Chicago Hospital; and she has worked with various court systems in turning children around. She has volunteered in school sponsored reading programs where we’ve again witnessed her skill in improving even the most recalcitrant students. She holds teaching certification in Orton-Gillingham tutoring from the Michigan Dyslexia Institute.
Sean Griobhtha (gree-O-tah) is a combat veteran. His latest book is X Rubicon: Crossing Life, Sex, Love, & Killing in CIA Proxy Wars: An indictment of US Citizens: ignorantia non excusat, which details the life of Rubicon (“2.5 years of Deception & Death; 40+ years of locking away Emotions & Truth”). It’s important that you read the Foreward (Vanguard); written by a highly intelligent woman with a heart of empathetic gold; she’ll bring you in gently, which neither Rubicon nor I would ever do.
Rubicon spent just under three years as a military Scout. During that time he was awarded the “AF Cross, 2 Silver Stars, 4 Bronze Stars, Defense Superior Service Medal, AF Good Conduct Medal, and the CIA Distinguished Service Medal” (ODNI). When he refused to kill further, he was stripped of these awards and was abandoned with his PTSD by the military and thrown away.
Read the Foreward (Vanguard) free at Substack. Learn more about the author and Rubicon at Substack and @seangriobhtha (FB). 40% discount available for book clubs, student groups, humanitarian groups, We Are Not Your Soldiers groups, Veterans for Peace groups, & more: Inquire at O.Griobhtha+XRubicon at gmail.
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The fact that parents have failed to realize their children were not learning phonics (and all the resulting complications from the use of these cue based "reading" systems) has been SO alarming to me. There is a podcast series called "Sold A Story" that explains more about how this happens, but it doesn't really have a response as to how we can fix the lifelong problem the children (some of which are already adults) who never learned how to read fluently. My daughter learned phonics and reading both at home and at school and it wasn't until we got to middle school we realized just how far behind most of her classmates were. Part of the problem is that kids can and do somehow make fairly decent grades even when they are functionally illiterate. This leads parents to think their kids can read because obviously if their kid couldn't read they wouldn't have As and Bs, right? It really is a huge problem and for all the reasons you list. Reading is really the only activity that can allow someone to experience what it feels like from the perspective of the other, any other. Watching TV, movies, video games, none of these things are using your whole mind and imagination in the same way. It isn't as complete as reading is at putting yourself into the eyes of someone else. It is absolutely necessary to develop empathy. Reading is also a temporary respite from unpleasant realities and I think because of this there are still kids who somehow manage to teach themselves to read simply because they must to survive their childhoods. But now instead most of those kids are just on their phones, learning who knows.
Thanks for writing this. This is one of those problems so big and pervasive it’s hard to see. It also gave me a new appreciation for my mother, who is a retired librarian, author of adult literacy books, and who has tutored ESL students—all things I have shamefully thought of as ‘boring’ for too long. The truth is, she has been fighting quietly on the frontlines all along.