Illiteracy

“ Remembering that illiteracy is a crude and extreme test of ignorance, we may assume that there are in the United States ten million people over ten years of age who are too ignorant either to perform their civic duties or to teach industrial efficiency. ”

“ Atticus G. Haygood, D.D., President of Emery College, Oxford, Ga.:
“There is a vast mass of illiteracy among us. There is white as well as black illiteracy. There are multiplied thousands who can neither read nor write. They must be taught. ”

“ The moonlight school in 1911 advanced the idea that illiteracy could be wiped out of a given locality within a given time. It is an idea that has taken such firm hold on the public mind that nothing less than the emancipation of every illiterate will satisfy the public conscience. The removal of illiteracy is now the fixed purpose of the Nation. ”

“ Among the causes of crime, illiteracy by no means plays so important a part as is generally believed. For this reason, when we are studying the condition of any particular country, we must avoid laying too great a stress upon the percentage of illiterates among its population. ”

“ This is naturally a very difficult thing to measure. Beyond actual feeble-mindedness, the only test of intellectual capacity which has received wide application is the literacy—or, as it is more frequently expressed, the illiteracy—test. ”

“ So that in the States of greatest illiteracy the relative increase of criminals during the last twenty years has been six times as rapid as in the States of least illiteracy. And if we ask in what classes the most ignorance is to be found, our census tells us that the foreign-born are fifty per cent more illiterate than the natives, and the blacks seven times as illiterate as the whites; and our census tells us. further that the foreign-born furnish one hundred per cent more than their share of criminals, and the blacks one hundred and fifty per cent more than their share. ”

“ The civilization of illiteracy transcends the literate model of individual performance considered a guarantee of the performance of society at large.
As practical experiences become more complex, breakdowns can be avoided only at the expense of more cognitive resources. ”

“ If he is fit, he should be given all the rights to earn his own livelihood, and to better himself, that any man can have. Take such a matter as the illiteracy test; I entirely agree with those who feel that many very excellent possible citizens would be barred improperly by an illiteracy test. ”

“ Some educated people had no more intelligent idea, at the outset, about removing illiteracy, than had a certain old colored professor in Mississippi when the crusade was started in that state. The teachers in their examinations were asked the question, “How rid the state of adult illiteracy?” and the professor wrote this answer: “The only [158] way to rid the state of adult illiteracy is to get rid of the adults. You should not have adults around your place or anywhere. As long as you have adults around, you’ll always have illiteracy.” ”

“ Illiteracy begets illiteracy. An examination of the census reveals this clearly. The names of parents and grandparents on the illiteracy list are usually followed by the names of most of their progeny. A family name is duplicated many times on the list. As a measure for insuring the education of the coming generation, the illiterate adults should be taught, for even where compulsory attendance laws are well enforced, public sentiment back of them is the only thing that can make them completely effective. ”

“ Do you suppose the citizens of these Catholic countries, with their high per cent of illiteracy, are more kind, honest, industrious, and law-abiding than the people of the Protestant nations, where there is a lower per cent of illiteracy? ”

“ The replacement of the literate use of language by the illiteracy of the many languages dismissing it in work, market transactions, and even social life is the process to which we are at the same time witnesses and agents of change. ”

“ One reason, aside from insufficient or incompetent instruction in the schools, for the so often complained of illiteracy, so to speak, of students, is probably to be found in the mass of stories which the Carnegie and other libraries feed to them, and which they skim through at the double quick, getting no permanent impression. ”

“ The superstition of education. Popular education and certain faiths about popular education are in the mores of our time. We regard illiteracy as an abomination. We ascribe to elementary book learning power to form character, make good citizens, keep family mores pure, elevate morals, establish individual character, civilize barbarians, and cure social vice and disease. We apply schooling as a remedy for every social phenomenon which we do not like. ”

“ The struggle between the value of life in the civilization of literacy and that of illiteracy can be seen in hospitals and nursing homes where the aged are treated on machine-based analogies, abandoned or entrusted to specialists in the care of the dying. ”

“ There were middle-aged men who had seen a hundred golden opportunities pass them by because of the handicap of illiteracy, whose mineral, timber and material stores, as well as their time and labor, were in the control of the educated men, making them but beggars, as it were, on the bounty of those whom they enriched. ”

“ Every one of your defects has elements of force and beauty; nearly all your merits contain grains of defect. Your style is in harmony with your matter. You are illiterate in a marked degree. Sometimes your illiteracy is that of neologist or a great poet who is perpetually reconstructing a language in his own manner, or that of an officer who sits in his tent and writes to a friend. ”

“ The Surgeon General’s report on illiteracy in the American Army showed that out of a million and a half registrants examined, one man out of every four was unable to read and understand a newspaper or to write a letter home. The exact percentage of illiteracy among these men, he stated, was 24.9 percent and ran as high as 49.5 percent in men sent from one of the states. ”

“ And the result is that high authorities in the educational world write articles on "The Increasing Illiteracy of the American People," and experienced professors explain how it is that all the instruction they give to their pupils in English language and literature can not overcome their corrupt habits of speech. ”

“ We have been in the past contented with the dictum that the public schools exist in order to abolish illiteracy, but now we are inclined to take the fuller meaning which, surprisingly enough, the dictionary gives: “to educate is to qualify for the business and duties of life.” ”

“ Through the literacy model, the state became a self- preserving bureaucratic machine rarely akin to the broad variety of options brought about by the pragmatic framework of the civilization of illiteracy.
Many more people than previous records mention become (or remain) illiterates after finishing the required years of schooling-a minimum of ten years-and even after graduating from college. Some people know how to read; even how to write, but opt for scanning TV channels, playing games, attending sports events, or surfing the Internet. ”

“ Frequently using stereotypes that in themselves affect language quality, such enterprises plead for teaching adults who cannot read or write, for improving language study in all grades, and for raising public awareness of illiteracy and its various implications. Still, we do not really understand the necessary character of the decline of literacy. ”

“ I submit herewith, for publication as a Bulletin of the Bureau of Education, a statement showing in some detail the amount of illiteracy in the United States among men, women and children over ten years of age according to the Federal Census of 1910 ”

“ The General Line of Educational Activity: Every genuinely democratic power must, in the domain of education, in a country where illiteracy and ignorance reign supreme, make its first aim the struggle against this darkness. ”

“ The National Educational Association, the greatest influence in educational affairs of the United States, has accepted the idea and has made the removal of illiteracy the first provision in its educational program for America. ”

“ I call on the American people and organizations of every kind to observe the month with activities to increase awareness of the problem of adult illiteracy and to encourage involvement in programs to help eliminate illiteracy and functional illiteracy among adults in our Nation. ”

“ The incidence of illiteracy and functional illiteracy among the Nation's adult population negatively affects our economy, our social institutions, and our security. It also limits the opportunities open to those who lack basic reading and writing skills. ”

“ Just look at the records of our mentally and morally deranged as exhibited in our statistics of insanity and crime and vice, and they alone are enough to cast doubt upon the claim that a publicschool education for our illiterates is sufficient to insure a decrease of mental and moral delinquency. For it remains to be explained why, in the decade ending with 1880, population having increased thirty per cent and illiteracy only ten per cent, a relative decrease ”

“ In countries with a relatively small number of illiterates, like England, the Netherlands, and Prussia, for example, the difference is naturally much greater than in a country like Italy where the percentage of illiteracy is great. ”

“ Do not these facts prove that the advance in crime is the result not of education but of the absence of education? We might think so, if figures had not that reprehensible habit of being all things to all men. Therefore, we may find, upon a more careful examination, that there is some other cause than ignorance for this rapid growth of our prison population in certain parts of our country. If I am not mistaken, there are several such causes, some of them entirely independent of the change in the illiteracy of the nation. ”

“ Illiteracy must be banished from the land if we shall attain that high destiny as the foremost of the enlightened nations of the world which, under Providence, we ought to achieve. ”

“ A look at how the course offerings changed over time brings clear evidence that logic, rhetoric, culture, appreciation of the word and of the rules of grammar and syntax-all the values associated with a dominant literacy-are relegated to specializations in philosophy, literature, or written communication, and to a vast, though confusing, repertory of elective classes, which reflect an obsession with free choice and a leveling notion of democracy. ”

“ You have known me some years—that is to say, I was leaving college shortly after you entered, and you know how I have ever prized education—that it has been my watchword, my constant theme when I had a seat in Parliament. I don’t sit now, but that’s not my fault; but when I did sit, my constant agitation was education. “Educate,” said I, “educate! that is the panacea for every social evil!” ”

“ Schools in which lies were sacred and truths profane. Schools for the more general diffusion of ignorance—schools to prevent thought—to suppress knowledge. Schools for the purpose of enslaving the world. ”

“ Laxness of discipline in seminary and college, the strange mingling of trivialities and superstitions which finally assumed the place of education, the misusages of society which condemned the offspring of well-to-do parents to the temptations of idleness, each has its own long chapter in the nine hundred pages of this interesting but endless volume. ”

“ The teacher, therefore, who wishes that his instructions may have the force of principles, must endeavour to bring the truths he inculcates, into such constant notice, that they may become habitual motives to the will. In a school where there is no order, no subordination, a boy may read lessons of obedience, and self government, day after day, without having any impression made upon his mind. Has he learned to steal and to tell lies; occasional punishment will not be sufficient to enforce the principles of truth and honesty. ”

“ Many, urged by words like these, placed themselves under the court teachers, and those who considered the labour of learning to read too gigantic to be undertaken at their age, had their sons and freed men educated, and employed them to read to them, lamenting their own ignorance, and extolling the superior advantages enjoyed by the youth of the present times. ”

“ It has been made a reproach to the educated classes that they have followed too exclusively after one or two pursuits, the law, journalism, or school teaching; and that these are all callings which make men inclined to overrate the importance of words and phrases. ”

“ When at last he is allowed to take up the study of nature, at the wrong end of his school course, what wonder that he sits with folded hands, waiting to be told facts to commit to memory, that he can not realize what a law is, and does not know how to use his reason in obtaining knowledge? Rational education will never flourish as it should till a reformation in the teaching of reading and spelling has been accomplished. ”

“ Assume no false appearances, in your school, either as to knowledge or character. Perhaps it may justly be said to be the common practice of teachers in this country, to affect dignity of deportment in the presence of their pupils, which, in other cases, is laid aside; and to pretend to superiority in knowledge, and an infallibility of judgment, which no sensible man would claim before other sensible men, but which an absurd fashion seems to require of the teacher. ”

“ Here you are in a school the equal of any of its grade in the land, with better methods of instruction than prevailed anywhere when I was a boy, with the gates of all knowledge opened as freely to you as to any youth in the land—here, in this State, where only about twenty years ago it was a misdemeanor, punishable with fine and imprisonment, to teach a colored person to read and write. ”