Adult Illiteracy :: Adult Illiteracy Essays

Learning to bear witness is like learning to drive a car. You egress lessons and learn the mechanics and the rules of the road. After a few weeks you havelearned how to drive, how to stop, how to shift gears, how to park, and how to signal. You have also learned to stop at a tearing light and understandroad signs. When you are ready, you take a road test, and if you pass, you can drive. Phonics-first works the same way. The child learns themechanics of education, and when hes through, he can read. olfactory property and say works differently. The child is taught to read before he has learned themechanics the sounds of the letters. It is like learning to drive by starting your car and thrust ahead. . .And the mechanics of driving? Youwould pick those up as you go along. Rudolf Flesch, Why Johnny Still Cant Read, 1981 Illiteracy in America is still growing at an alarming rate and that fact has not changed much since Rudolf Flesch wrote his best-selling expose of reading instructi onin 1955. Illiteracy continues to be a critical problem, demanding massive resources from local, state, and federal taxes, while arguments about how to teachchildren to read continue to rage within the education research community, on Capitol Hill, in business, and in the classroom.The International variation Association estimates that more than one thousand research papers are prepared each year on the subject of literacy, and that is verylikely a low figure. For the past 50 years, Americas classrooms have been used by psychologists, sociologists, educationists, and politicians as a giant laboratoryfor unproven, untried theories of learning, resulting in a near fragmentise of public education. It is time we begin to move away from whats new and move towardwhat works.The grim statisticsAccording to the National Adult Literacy Survey, 42 million adult Americans cant read 50 million can recognize so few printed words they are limited to a 4th or5th grade reading level one out of e very four teenagers drops out of high school, and of those who graduate, one out of every four has the equivalent or less of anone-eighth grade education.According to current estimates, the rate of functionally illiterate adults is increasing by approximately two and one quarter million persons each year. Thisnumber includes nearly 1 million young people who drop out of school before graduation, 400,000 legal immigrants, 100,000 refugees, and 800,000 illegal