Widespread education not only leads to lower education and employment rates, it is also linked to increased crime and incarceration and a high social and economic cost. Read on to learn more about the terrible effects of illiteracy on society and what you can do to help.
What is Illiteracy?
Most people think of literacy as a simple question of being able to read. But while a young child who can work her way through a basic picture book is considered to have age-appropriate literacy levels, an adult who can only read at the most fundamental level is still functionally illiterate.
The world requires that adults not only be able to read and understand basic texts, but also be able to function in the workplace, pay bills, understand legal and financial documents and navigate technology - not to mention the advanced reading comprehension skills required to pursue postsecondary education and the opportunities that come with it.
As a result, when we talk about the effects of illiteracy on society, we're talking primarily about what happens when you have a large number of adults whose literacy skills are too low to perform normal, day-to-day tasks. However, it is worth keeping in mind that childhood illiteracy is, of course, directly correlated to adult illiteracy.
Illiteracy Around the World
In 2003, the United Nations launched the United Nations Literacy Decade (UNLD) with the slogan, 'Literacy is freedom.' Operating under the premise that 'literacy is a human right,' the initiative aims to improve literacy efforts, increase global literacy levels and reduce poverty.
According to the UNLD:
- Worldwide, one in five adults cannot read or write
- In low-income countries, only about 61% of adults are literate
- In high-income countries, almost 99% of adults are literate
Illiteracy in the U.S.
Compared to the rest of the world, the U.S. is doing well. According to the latest International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS), between 19% and 23% of American adults performed at the top levels for each of the three literacy scales: document literacy, prose literacy and quantitative (number) literacy. Sweden is the only country that scored higher.
Yet many Americans are being left behind. The same survey found that between 21% and 24% of U.S. adults performed at the lowest level for all three scales, a figure echoed by the National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS). So what effect does this have on society in the United States?
Poverty & Employment
On average, adults at the lowest levels of literacy:
- Earn about $230-$245 per week
- Work only 18-19 weeks each year
- Are more than three times as likely to receive food stamps (17%-19% as compared to 4% of those who read at the highest levels)
- Are almost ten times more likely to be living below the poverty line (41%-44% as compared to 4%-8%)
Incarceration
- Between 31% and 40% of prisoners read at the lowest literacy level, which is at least ten percentage points worse than the national average
- Only four percent to seven percent of the prison population reads at the highest two literacy levels, compared to 18% to 21% of the rest of the population
As the above statistics show, illiteracy can be closely correlated with low earnings and high incarceration rates. Individuals who cannot read struggle to function in society, which can cripple their lives and increase the burden on state prisons and economic support systems.
How You Can Help
Although illiteracy seems like an overwhelming problem, there are many things that individuals can do to help. You can help prevent illiteracy by becoming a tutor at a nearby school or going to a poor neighborhood and offering literacy support at a local school or community center. You can also help adults overcome literacy challenges by volunteering at an adult basic education center where you can teach adults to read and help them with basic life skills.
Individuals who want to spend more time working on this issue may consider getting involved with a national organization like AmeriCorps. Students who would like to devote themselves to fighting illiteracy may be interested in degrees in education, public administration or social work.
You can view statistics from the UNLD, IALS and NALS via UNESCO (www.unesco.org), the National Center for Education Statistics (www.nces.ed.gov) and the U.S. Census Bureau (www.census.gov).
The Three Kinds of Illiteracy
The restoration of functional, cultural, and moral literacy requires
that we expose the ideologies and movements which have promulgated relativistic
nonsense and moral bankruptcy
Education at all levels in the United States has reached the crisis stage. Of
course, the situation didn't arise yesterday; it has developed over a period of
decades. Nor is the crisis news to people who have been paying attention to
what's been going on in the country.
This crisis of education is manifested in three levels of illiteracy:
functional illiteracy, cultural illiteracy, and moral illiteracy. Typically, to
say that a person is illiterate means that the person cannot read or write. But
the word does have other senses. It is sometimes used of someone who is ignorant
of the fundamentals of a particular art or area of knowledge. It is this broader
meaning that is in view when, for example, we say that a person is musically
illiterate. The word can also be used to describe a person who falls short of
some expected standard of competence regarding some skill or body of
information. In this last sense, a person who falls short of our commonly
expected standard of competence in mathematics can be described as illiterate,
even if he or she is quite competent in language skills.Click Here to Read Full Article»
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