Open letter: advice for a candidate who remembers when 2nd-graders could read - letter to Bob Dole - Back to School

National Review, Sept 30, 1996 by Regina Lee Wood

Advice for a candidate who remembers when 2nd-graders could read.

DEAR Senator Dole: Before it is too late, Americans must see that adult illiteracy is not just one among many serious national problems. It is the source of the worst ills of American society today.

As long as a third of America's public-school students in grades 4 through 12 can't read, efforts to save the nation with flatter taxes, balanced budgets, welfare reform, more policemen, or line-item vetoes are in vain.

Demonstrably, devastating illiteracy among schoolchildren came first among the problems afflicting our society, and it must go first. The incidence of juvenile crime doubled in the U.S. between 1948 and 1955. Ironically, it doubled while Axis and other Allied countries were still enjoying the decrease in juvenile delinquency that occurred when fathers who had been in military service in World War II came home. The difference in our country was that illiteracy had begun to soar in the early 1940s. And when the bored and resentful illiterate teenagers of the late 1940s became bored and resentful illiterate men, the numbers of American girls and women with illegitimate babies doubled between 1950 and 1960.

Indeed, the failure to teach millions of normal first-, second-, and third-graders to read in the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties was surely a major factor in the "Savage Sixties," with their riots, gang wars, soaring crime, and burgeoning welfare.

The scores on Armed Forces academic tests taken during the draft years from 1940 to 1973 should have warned us: Illiteracy -- defined by the Army as the inability to read at a fourth-grade level -- zoomed from 4 per cent during World War II to 20 per cent during the Korean War to over 25 per cent during the Vietnam War -- a 500 per cent increase. And illiteracy among military registrants with at least 4 years of education skyrocketed from 1 out of 200 in World War II to 20 out of 100 in the Korean War to more than 25 out of 100 in the Vietnam War -- an unbelievable 5,000 per cent increase.

The Army rejected 600,000 to 700,000 young men between 1950 and 1953 because they couldn't read orders, signs, maps, and safety regulations. Defense Department psychologists interviewed thousands of non-reading high-school graduates who were suspected of faking illiteracy to stay out of the Korean War. They weren't.

Why did the World War II registrants outscore the Korean and Vietnam War registrants by so much? By any of today's standards for estimating success or failure for students, the World War II registrants should have made the lowest, not the highest, scores.

Half were from families with incomes below the poverty line.

Only 30 per cent had high-school diplomas; just 5 per cent had college degrees.

Average schooling for white adults was 8-plus years; for black adults, 4-plus years.

There was no pre-school or Head Start. Three-fourths of the World War II generation went to schools with 7- or 8-month school years.

In 1990 dollars the yearly expenditures per student in the years when World War II GIs were in grade school ranged from $500 to $950.

What did the World War II registrants have that Korean War registrants just 5 to 9 years younger didn't have? Why are they the undisputed twentieth-century scholastic champions? The prospective World War II recruits had all learned to match spoken sounds with letters that spell sounds in phonics reading classes before 1932. Many of the Korean War registrants had learned -- or not learned -- to read in the new whole-word sight-repetition reading classes that were introduced in 1933.

THE World War II generation learned to read well and easily before 1932. And they were able to put their reading skills to use. History proves it.

When Congress passed the draft legislation in September 1940, there were just 200,000 Americans in the Armed Forces, and another 200,000 in the Reserves. When the Japanese signed the peace treaty in September 1945, 11 million were in uniform; 12 million had served. And another 9 to 10 million Americans were doing civilian jobs they had learned to do since 1940. Overnight U.S. business, professional, and military leaders managed to train more than 20 million U.S. citizens to do new, sometimes difficult, and often very dangerous jobs. And they did both military and civilian jobs to a fare-thee-well. They fought everywhere, even when the odds were hopeless. And they built ships, tanks, trucks, and planes; they made guns, shells, boots, uniforms, tents, and parachutes; they processed A, B, and C rations; they assembled generators, radios, radar, and sonar for Allied armies and navies all over the world. What they had going for them was a 97 per cent literacy rate. They never could have done all this with today's 76 per cent workforce literacy rate -- one which we share with Zimbabwe.

When the U.S. Department of Education released the first report on the congressionally mandated National Adult Literacy Survey in September 1993, President Clinton should have declared a period of national mourning.