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OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: Democracy for dummies


Everyone who has written for publication has had the experience of being misapprehended. Nearly every week I'll get an email or a letter from someone who has completely misunderstood what I was trying to say.

Usually I tell myself it's my own fault. Clarity ought to be job one. When a reader says a text is confusing to them, they are never wrong. We cannot assume that our own experience is universal and that everyone gets our allusions or our jokes.

Then there are times when you sense the misunderstanding is more the result of pugnaciousness. Some people enjoy taking offense; others make a game of trolling. There's a strain of fashionable nihilism that has infected our discourse that some people have adopted as their primary mode of expression.

It's not too difficult to recognize these snarky cool kids, and you can engage with them if you want, knowing the only thing at stake is ego. (This brand of snark is nothing new; William Blake took down the "Idiot Questioner" in his early 19th-century poem "Milton": "Who publishes doubt and calls it knowledge: whose Science is Despair ..."

Then there are people who simply lack the wherewithal to make sense of prose that's not been processed for, well, dummies. According to the U.S. Department of Education, 54 percent of Americans between the ages of 17 and 74 read below the equivalent of the sixth grade level. In 2019, the National Center for Education Statistics published a study that categorized 21 percent of American adults as having "low level English literacy." Four percent of the population is considered functionally illiterate.

That last number doesn't shock me. There's always going to be a bottom five percentile of everything. There's always going to be a last-place finisher in any race. Some adults are unable to read, write or make simple mathematical calculations. There will always be a portion of the population that is unable to keep up.

But literacy is something that most people can achieve.

We should take notice that the definition of literacy is itself a sliding rule. It used to be that anyone who could manage to scrawl what passed for a signature was considered literate. The bar is considerably higher now. To be functional in society you have to be able to fill out forms, to read and understand simple directions; maybe you should be able to conduct a search of the Internet.

The United States Army was among the first American institutions to conduct literacy tests, for the pragmatic purpose of determining whether recruits were worth training as soldiers. If they didn't possess basic competence in reading, writing and arithmetic, it was too much trouble to train them to be soldiers. As a result, during World War I, about 25 percent of recruits--as many as 700,000 men--were rejected for service as unable to meet basic literacy qualifications.

That stunned the American public and led to improvements in public education throughout the the 1920s and 1930s. But during World War II, the Army again rejected an estimated 750,000 men who could not pass basic literacy entrance tests. In part this was because the new tests held recruits to a higher standard, and in part due to the expansion of recruiting into minority communities that were often poorer and less educated. But it was still a bewilderingly high number.

Before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that precipitated America's entry into the war, recruits who failed the Minimum Literacy Test were simply rejected. But in 1942, when it became clear substantially more men would be needed, the military ruled that up to 10 percent of inductees could be illiterate so long as they were "intelligent and trainable."

In 1943, this quota was reduced to five percent because illiteracy had caused some problems in the field. A few months later, manpower needs caused the literacy requirement to be dropped entirely. The military was no longer rejecting anyone just because they couldn't read or write.

Instead, it embarked on one of the largest programs of basic adult education in human history. It employed special training units with qualified teachers teaching small classes with specially-designed course materials. The success rate was remarkable: About 95 percent of illiterate recruits achieved minimum literacy within two months.

They then went on to basic training and the battlefield. Studies showed that a lot of them who came back continued their education after leaving the military. Many went on to college on the G.I. Bill.

But it's not that bottom four or five percent that worries me. Because if you can't read and write, you're likely to know that. You're likely to perceive your inability as a serious handicap to your achieving the kind of life you want to live. You're likely to be ashamed of your incapability. You're likely to have developed compensatory skills for negotiating the world. You're likely to be acutely aware of how much you don't know.

But if you're in the next 49 percent, you probably think you're just fine. That you can read and write as well as the next person (and there would be some truth in that). You might assume that you read and write as well as you need to read and write and that the reading of books is an arcane pastime pursued mainly by a suspect cult of pretentious would-be intellectuals who probably don't have the gumption to make it in the real world of dog eat dog.

You might be like basketball coach Bobby Knight, who once observed, "All of us learn to write in the second grade ... most of us go on to greater things." Har har.

The trouble is, we don't all learn to write in the second grade. Some of us get all the way through school without developing any real fluency with the written word. Instead we learn hustle and patter, the American way of glide and jive.

We learn how to fake it, and some of us end up imagining that faking it is all there is to it. (While others, no matter how much they worry, never arrive at a place where they can consider themselves authentic.)

In our digital world it is perfectly possible to people to grow up and prosper with only rudimentary reading and writing skills. There are other ways of eloquent expression, and if you can play music or compose code or move your body with uncommon precision and grace, then it may well be that the written word is an elective pursuit for you. (Though I would always want to read and understand whatever contracts I am given to sign.)

Writers always think reading is important, as though podcasts and audio books had never been invented. Literacy is forever being redefined.

pmartin@adgnewsroom.com


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