The Role of Illiteracy in Social and Economic Problems

The following information is from a report published by the San Diego Council on Literacy, and is presented here with their permission.

The San Diego Council on Literacy defines literacy as the "ability of an individual to read, write, and speak in English and compute, and solve problems at levels of proficiency necessary to function on the job and in society, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential to achieve one’s goals."

General: United States
Approximately 75% of adults identified as possessing only minimal literacy skills in the United States are English speaking (Adult Literacy in America: National Adult Literacy Survey, Educational Testing Service, 1993).

Poverty
Approximately 44% of adults with minimal literacy skills are living in poverty (Adult Literacy in America: National Adult Literacy Survey, Educational Testing Service, 1993).

Health and Medicine
A nine-day-old baby died when her mother fed her undiluted formula because she couldn’t read the measuring instructions. An illiterate nursing home employee had to memorize what the patients’ names looked like and what kind of diets they were on (Business Council for Effective Literacy, July 1986).

Education
"More than half our young people leave school without the knowledge or foundation required to find and hold a good job." (Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, "The Written Word," September 1991).

"It is not uncommon today to find 30% to 40% of entering freshmen reading below 7^th grade level. Each fall, colleges find dozens, sometimes hundreds of students who…are reading below a 4^th grade level." (Colleges Responses to Low Achieving Students, Professors Roueche, Baker, and Roueche, University of Texas, 1984; Business Council for Effective Literacy, April 1987).

Crime and Law
Of the 1.2 million people currently incarcerated more than 70% are functionally illiterate and only 20% are in education programs. Some 98% of these inmates will be freed eventually, most within the next five years (Correctional Educational Association, Laurel, MD, 1993).

Approximately 82% of the inmates in the Orange County Jail System in California are functionally illiterate in English (Report on the Literacy Skills of Inmates in the Orange County Jail System, Orange County Public Library and Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Department, 1993).

Inmates and offenders are among the most poorly educated people of any society. (International Conference on Literacy in Corrections, "The Written Word," September 1993)

Employment/The Workforce
Eighty-one percent of small manufacturers have problems related to employee education and training according to a survey of 2,284 manufacturers:

• 52% said their employees have difficulty resolving problems independently.
• 37% said employees have difficulty reading, writing, and understanding English.
• 36% said employees have difficulty understanding math concepts.
• 20% said employees have difficulty in being trained in operations ("Written Word," August 1991, and the National Association of Manufacturers).

Approximately 40% to 50% of the unemployed have limited literacy skills (Educational Testing Service, Beyond School Doors, 1992).

"The typical U.S. factory invests 20-25% of its budget in finding and fixing mistakes and another five percent for recalls after mistakes have left the factory." (American and the New Economy, American Society of Training and Development; Business Council for Effective Literacy, July 91).

A New York insurance company says 70% of dictated correspondence must be done over because typists can’t punctuate and spell correctly. An insurance company employee paid $2,200 on a $100 claim instead of $22.00 because she didn’t understand decimals. A steel-mill worker who couldn’t read cost his company more than $1 million when he mis-ordered parts from a warehouse. An illiterate mechanic cost the navy $250,000 in damaged equipment because he couldn’t read the repair manual. A fee-lot laborer accidentally killed a herd of cattle when he misread a package label and fed them poison instead of food. A train motorman, on trial for negligence in a fatal accident, admitted he had trouble reading his service manual, as did many of his coworkers. An industrial worker almost killed several people when he attached a heavy piece of metal to a machine improperly because he couldn’t read the assembly instructions (Business Council for Effective Literacy, July 1986).

"Only 20% of job applicants at Motorola can pass a simple 7^th grade test of English comprehension or a 5^th grade mathematics test." ("Can Your Workers Read?" Nation’s Business, October 1993)

Societal
A recent TV Guide poll of television viewers showed that 25% of the respondents would not give up their television, even for a million dollars. Television has become an "essential" part of their lives (Center for Media and Values, 1993).

The American Newspaper Publishers Association and the International Reading Association recommended that the next President should "speak out about the relationship between literacy and such social problems as welfare dependency, parenting skills, crime, international competitiveness, productivity, and jobs" (Business Council for Effective Literacy, October 1988).

Conclusion
Illiteracy is not dramatic, but it does set the stage for the drama. It is not murder, AIDS, drugs, poverty, or unemployment. At the same time, it is all these things. It is the 3^rd grader with low self esteem, the wife beater and victim of family violence, the dropout, the pregnant teenager, the unemployed mother, the man behind prison walls, the neglected child, the gang member, the drug dealer, the cancer patient, and the marooned family members lacking access to the health and human services a community can offer. Many individuals have a difficult time finding health and human services because they cannot read. They do not know how to look up services in the telephone book. They cannot read the United Way’s list of social service agencies. They do not know to call Ask-A-Nurse for medical advice. They do not have access to information.

Literacy is many things. It is power. It is a political act. It is freedom and it is a tool for discovering one’s personal incarceration. It is a key to success. It is discovering God and salvation. It is family unity. It is communication and interaction with other people. It is survival with room for error. More than anything, it is a tool for acquiring knowledge and functioning in society. Society is complex enough as it stands. Basic literacy is vital to the individual and to our way of life. It affects everybody. It is a starting place for solutions.