While making a classroom observation visit a few weeks ago, I jotted notes about several of the posters and wall hangings in the high school English class. One was a handmade poster with national literacy statistics: the percentage of unemployed people with low reading skills, the reading skills of prisoners, and Americans in general. The starkness of the information made me uncomfortable, and I questioned, to myself, the wisdom of hanging it on the wall. But that first impression was totally misguided.
Chatting with the teacher after class was over, I noted how engaged many of the students had been as they talked about character development in Lord of the Flies. I asked how he got the students, generally, to do their reading homework.
At the beginning of the year, they didn’t. “‘We’re allergic to reading,’ they’d complain,” the teacher said. It wasn’t their style. They didn’t want to. So he did some research on how well people who weren’t getting ahead could read, talked about the dismal statistics with the class, and posted them on the wall. The poster was in fact crucial to motivating the students to read because he was honest about the impact a lack of literacy skills would have on their lives. Now many of them did their reading homework.
I didn’t capture the exact stats this teacher had, but has some stark numbers:
- 14 percent of the U.S. population—that’s 30 million people—have “below basic” prose literacy skills; they cannot understand newspaper articles or instruction manuals
- 12 percent have below basic document literacy—”they cannot fill in a job application or payroll form, read a map or bus schedule, or understand labels on foods and drugs”
And the 2003 has data like this: 51 percent of adults with “below basic” literacy skills were unemployed; only 18 percent with “proficient skills” were without a job.
So reading is important, but being honest about its benefits and the consequences of not being a literate person is equally important.