Posted on 09/02/2010 5:43:28 PM PDT by AuntB
At the start of WWII millions of men showed up at registration offices to take low-level academic tests before being inducted.1 The years of maximum mobilization were 1942 to1944; the fighting force had been mostly schooled in the 1930s, both those inducted and those turned away. Of the 18 million men were tested, 17,280,000 of them were judged to have the minimum competence in reading required to be a soldier, a 96 percent literacy rate. Although this was a 2 percent fall-off from the 98 percent rate among voluntary military applicants ten years earlier, the dip was so small it didn’t worry anybody.
WWII was over in 1945. Six years later another war began in Korea. Several million men were tested for military service but this time 600,000 were rejected. Literacy in the draft pool had dropped to 81 percent, even though all that was needed to classify a soldier as literate was fourth- grade reading proficiency. In the few short years from the beginning of WWII to Korea, a terrifying problem of adult illiteracy had appeared. The Korean War group received most of its schooling in the 1940s, and it had more years in school with more professionally trained personnel and more scientifically selected textbooks than the WWII men, yet it could not read, write, count, speak, or think as well as the earlier, less-schooled contingent.
A third American war began in the mid-1960s. By its end in 1973 the number of men found noninductible by reason of inability to read safety instructions, interpret road signs, decipher orders, and so on—in other words, the number found illiterate—had reached 27 percent of the total pool. Vietnam-era young men had been schooled in the 1950s and the 1960s—much better schooled than either of the two earlier groups—but the 4 percent illiteracy of 1941 which had transmuted into the 19 percent illiteracy of 1952 had now had grown into the 27 percent illiteracy of 1970. Not only had the fraction of competent readers dropped to 73 percent but a substantial chunk of even those were only barely adequate; they could not keep abreast of developments by reading a newspaper, they could not read for pleasure, they could not sustain a thought or an argument, they could not write well enough to manage their own affairs without assistance.
Consider how much more compelling this steady progression of intellectual blindness is when we track it through army admissions tests rather than college admissions scores and standardized reading tests, which inflate apparent proficiency by frequently changing the way the tests are scored.
Looking back, abundant data exist from states like Connecticut and Massachusetts to show that by 1840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was between 93 and 100 percent wherever such a thing mattered. According to the Connecticut census of 1840, only one citizen out of every 579 was illiterate and you probably don’t want to know, not really, what people in those days considered literate; it’s too embarrassing. Popular novels of the period give a clue: Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826, sold so well that a contemporary equivalent would have to move 10 million copies to match it. If you pick up an uncut version you find yourself in a dense thicket of philosophy, history, culture, manners, politics, geography, analysis of human motives and actions, all conveyed in data-rich periodic sentences so formidable only a determined and well-educated reader can handle it nowadays. Yet in 1818 we were a small-farm nation without colleges or universities to speak of. Could those simple folk have had more complex minds than our own?
By 1940, the literacy figure for all states stood at 96 percent for whites, 80 percent for blacks. Notice that for all the disadvantages blacks labored under, four of five were nevertheless literate. Six decades later, at the end of the twentieth century, the National Adult Literacy Survey and the National Assessment of Educational Progress say 40 percent of blacks and 17 percent of whites can’t read at all. Put another way, black illiteracy doubled, white illiteracy quadrupled. Before you think of anything else in regard to these numbers, think of this: we spend three to four times as much real money on schooling as we did sixty years ago, but sixty years ago virtually everyone, black or white, could read.
In their famous bestseller, The Bell Curve, prominent social analysts Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein say that what we’re seeing are the results of selective breeding in society. Smart people naturally get together with smart people, dumb people with dumb people. As they have children generation after generation, the differences between the groups gets larger and larger. That sounds plausible and the authors produce impressive mathematics to prove their case, but their documentation shows they are entirely ignorant of the military data available to challenge their contention. The terrifying drop in literacy between World War II and Korea happened in a decade, and even the brashest survival-of-the-fittest theorist wouldn’t argue evolution unfolds that way. The Bell Curve writers say black illiteracy (and violence) is genetically programmed, but like many academics they ignore contradictory evidence.
For example, on the matter of violence inscribed in black genes, the inconvenient parallel is to South Africa where 31 million blacks live, the same count living in the United States. Compare numbers of blacks who died by violence in South Africa in civil war conditions during 1989, 1990, and 1991 with our own peacetime mortality statistics and you find that far from exceeding the violent death toll in the United States or even matching it, South Africa had proportionately less than one-quarter the violent death rate of American blacks. If more contemporary comparisons are sought, we need only compare the current black literacy rate in the United States (56 percent) with the rate in Jamaica (98.5 percent)—a figure considerably higher than the American white literacy rate (83 percent).
If not heredity, what then? Well, one change is indisputable, well-documented and easy to track. During WWII, American public schools massively converted to non-phonetic ways of teaching reading. On the matter of violence alone this would seem to have impact: according to the Justice Department, 80 percent of the incarcerated violent criminal population is illiterate or nearly so (and 67 percent of all criminals locked up). There seems to be a direct connection between the humiliation poor readers experience and the life of angry criminals.2
As reading ability plummeted in America after WWII, crime soared, so did out-of-wedlock births, which doubled in the 1950s and doubled again in the ’60s, when bizarre violence for the first time became commonplace in daily life.
When literacy was first abandoned as a primary goal by schools, white people were in a better position than black people because they inherited a three-hundred-year-old American tradition of learning to read at home by matching spoken sound with letters, thus home assistance was able to correct the deficiencies of dumbed-down schools for whites. But black people had been forbidden to learn to read under slavery, and as late as 1930 only averaged three to four years of schooling, so they were helpless when teachers suddenly stopped teaching children to read, since they had no fall-back position. Not helpless because of genetic inferiority but because they had to trust school authorities to a much greater extent than white people.
Back in 1952 the Army quietly began hiring hundreds of psychologists to find out how 600,000 high school graduates had successfully faked illiteracy. Regna Wood sums up the episode this way:
After the psychologists told the officers that the graduates weren’t faking, Defense Department administrators knew that something terrible had happened in grade school reading instruction. And they knew it had started in the thirties. Why they remained silent, no one knows. The switch back to reading instruction that worked for everyone should have been made then. But it wasn’t.
In 1882, fifth graders read these authors in their Appleton School Reader: William Shakespeare, Henry Thoreau, George Washington, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Bunyan, Daniel Webster, Samuel Johnson, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others like them. In 1995, a student teacher of fifth graders in Minneapolis wrote to the local newspaper, "I was told children are not to be expected to spell the following words correctly: back, big, call, came, can, day, did, dog, down, get, good, have, he, home, if, in, is, it, like, little, man, morning, mother, my, night, off, out, over, people, play, ran, said, saw, she, some, soon, their, them, there, time, two, too, up, us, very, water, we, went, where, when, will, would, etc.
Is this nuts?"
For those of you not fortunate enough to know of John Taylor Gatto.
He climaxed his teaching career as New York State Teacher of the Year after being named New York City Teacher of the Year on three occasions. He quit teaching on the OP ED page of the Wall Street Journal in 1991 while still New York State Teacher of the Year, claiming that he was no longer willing to hurt children. Later that year he was the subject of a show at Carnegie Hall called "An Evening With John Taylor Gatto," which launched a career of public speaking in the area of school reform, which has taken Gatto over a million and a half miles in all fifty states and seven foreign countries. In 1992, he was named Secretary of Education in the Libertarian Party Shadow Cabinet, and he has been included in Who's Who in America from 1996 on. In 1997, he was given the Alexis de Tocqueville Award for his contributions to the cause of liberty, and was named to the Board of Advisors of the National TV-Turnoff Week.
His books include: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992); The Exhausted School (1993); A Different Kind of Teacher (2000); and The Underground History Of American Education (2001)
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/aboutus/john.htm
A thoughtful piece for your consideration.
[snip]Notice that for all the disadvantages blacks labored under, four of five were nevertheless literate. Six decades later, at the end of the twentieth century, the National Adult Literacy Survey and the National Assessment of Educational Progress say 40 percent of blacks and 17 percent of whites can’t read at all. Put another way, black illiteracy doubled, white illiteracy quadrupled. Before you think of anything else in regard to these numbers, think of this: we spend three to four times as much real money on schooling as we did sixty years ago, but sixty years ago virtually everyone, black or white, could read.
Like, dude! /sarc
That is the most appalling thing I have read in months.
The Korean War started in the late 1940’s, in 1948, I believe. The following statement is therefore bogus:
“In the few short years from the beginning of WWII to Korea, a terrifying problem of adult illiteracy had appeared. The Korean War group received most of its schooling in the 1940s,..”
Another alternative logic, what is the correlation between the rise of single parent households and this decline?
If you have a minimally involved teaching environment and a minimally concerned family, it is almost impossible for a normal, non-challenged child not to be literate after 3rd grade. THIS IS CRIMINAL NEGLECT!
Korea War 1950-53.
Yeah, men were in school in the 40’s.
“The Korean War started in the late 1940’s, in 1948, I believe. The following statement is therefore bogus:
“In the few short years from the beginning of WWII to Korea, a terrifying problem of adult illiteracy had appeared. The Korean War group received most of its schooling in the 1940s,..””
It seems you back up what Gatto said....it started in ‘48....who enlists...YOUNG people...therefore they would have been educated in the 40’s...right?? (some part of the 30’s i suppose.)
Appalling ... whoa. You’re right.
DD, who is dyslexic, had all kinds of help with reading — but nothing clicked until one of her old-school teachers, now retired, reinforced phonics. So did a later special ed teacher — using a “new” phonics-based teaching method.
DD is a voracious reader.
The boys had better success early but now, as far as liking to read, not so much.
Not in any way a significant consideration, inasmuch as most kids these days would rather bash America than defend her.
What do you take issue with?
Because of the villification and what he called lies about his position, he wrote a book explaining and documenting his opposition. Using U. S. Census and other government statistics, he documented his claims, using crime and incarceration rates, and other such verifiable data, and explained his philosophical opposition as well.
"Poison drops in the federal Senate : the school question from a parental and non-sectarian stand-point : an epitome of the educational views of Zach. Montgomery on account of which views a stubborn but fruitless effort was made in the United States Senate to prevent his confirmation as Assistant Attorney General (1886)" can be read online here.
Below are excerpted remarks from Montgomery's "Poison Drops. . . ," regarding another of his primary concerns about what he observed to be changes in interpretations of the Constitution by means of the dictionaries and the teachings within the public schools and its potential effect on the understanding of future citizens about their rights and the government's limitations:
"CHAPTER VI. POLITICAL POISON IN THE PUBLIC-SCHOOL BOOKS — TEN MILLIONS OF AMERICAN CHILDREN FORCED TO DRINK DAILY THE DEADLY DOCTRINE OF CENTRALIZATION AND DESPOTISM ! ! !
"From, a Speech by the Author, delivered at San Diego, Cal., Oct. 30, 1884.
"In our California public schools, as in those of most of the other States, Webster's Dictionary is the legally established authority for the definition of words. This would all be well enough if the Webster of to-day were the Webster of twenty-five years ago. But the illustrious and patriotic Noah Webster would blush in his grave at the thought of being made to father the bastard brood of political heresies which are now being taught in our public schools, through the medium of a false, forged, and mutilated dictionary bearing his honored name.
"To show how the overthrow of constitutional liberty and the inestimable right of democratic' self-government are being brought about by changing the meaning of words, a few examples will suffice.
"Take for example the word "Constitution" Webster's Unabridged Dictionary," as published in 1859, the legal definition of the word "Constitution," says :
"'In free States the Constitution is paramount to the statutes or laws enacted by the Legislature. limiting and controlling its power; and in the United States the Legislature is created and its powers designated by the Constitution.'
"But every word of the above definition is expunged from the Webster now used and required by law to be used in our public schools, and in its place we find the following definition of the word "Constitution," to wit:
Political Poison in the Public- School Books. 39 "'The principal or fundamental laws which govern a State or other organized body. . . are embodied in written docu- ments or implied in the institutions or usages of the country or society.'
"Thus, under public-school tuition, the rising generation no longer look upon the written Constitution as the source and limit of legislative power; but on the contrary the mere " usages of society'''are raised to the dignity of constitutional law.
What a very convenient way of clothing official villainy in the garb of constitutional authority ! After our corrupt and perjured officials have violated, in a hundred ways, the Constitution they had solemnly sworn to support in order to carry out their nefarious schemes of fraud and plunder, how would it have been possible for them to have contrived a more ingenious device to justify in the eyes of the rising generation their official misdeeds, than by thus adopting, legalizing, and forcing into the public school, through their willing tools, a definition of the word " Constitution" sufficiently elastic to cover every species of their acctustomed rascalities?
"Again! The old Noah Webster of twenty-five years ago, in giving to the word "Union" its political signification, defines it as " States united. Thus the United States of America are SOMETIMES CALLED THE UnION."
"But in the false and mutilated Webster which the public-school system now forces our children to study this definition is entirely suppressed, and in its place we have the word " Union" defined as meaning —
"'A CONSOLIDATED BODY, AS THE UNITED StATES OF AMERICA, ARE OFTEN CALLED THE ' Union.' Thus, while the real statesmen of both political parties are warning the people against the danger of a consolidated government, the children, who are soon to take the places of these statesmen, through our public-school machinery are indoctrinated with the idea that we ah'eady have a consolidated republic. In the case of McCollough vs. The State of Maryland, Chief- Justice Marshall, of the Supreme Court of the United States, said:
"'No political dreamer was ever wild enough to think of breaking down the lines which separate the States and of compounding the American people into a solid mass.'
"But what no political dreamer was ever wild enough to think of in Judge Marshall's tiine is now taught as an accomplished fact.
"Again, " Webster's Dictionary" twenty-five years ago defined the word " Federal " as —
"'Consisting in a compact between parties, particularly P. 40 '' Poison Drops" in the Federal Senate. "'AND CHIEFLY BETWEEN StATES AND NATIONS FORMED ON ALLI- ANCE BY CONTRACT OR MUTUAL AGREEMENT, AS A FEDERAL GOV- ERNMENT, SUCH AS THAT OF THE UnITED StATES.' But the present public-school Webster, after expunging every syllable of this definition, defines " Federal " as being " specifically composed of States, and which retain only a subordinate and limited sovereignty, as the Union of the United States and the Sonderbund of Switzerland."
"A moment's reflection will show that under such a definition of the word "Federal," the several States composing the American Union would have no rights and no sovereignty which the General Government would be bound to respect.
"Now it is undoubtedly true that in all those matters in which, under the Constitution, the Federal Government has been clothed with sovereign authority, the authority of the States is subordinate to the Federal Government. But in all things else the sovereignty of the States is as supreme and as independent of the Federal sovereignty as if the Federal sovereignty had never existed.
"In the celebrated Dred Scott case the United States Supreme Court said :
"'The principles upon which our Governments rest, and upon which alone they continue to exist, is the union of States, sovereign and independent within their own limits, in their internal and domestic concerns.'
"But if, as now taught in the public schools of California and elsewhere, the States have no sovereignty except such as is subordinate to the sovereignty of the United States, what becomes of our sovereign right to local self-government? Suppose that the Federal Government should to-morrow, in the exercise of its supposed superior sovereignty, undertake to nullify our State Constitution and laws, abrogate our State Government, remove from office our Governor, abolish our State Courts and our legislature, and force us to accept for our local government just such laws as the Federal Congress might choose to give us, such State, county, and municipal officers as the President might send to rule over us, what remedy would we have? Shall I be told that such action on the part of the Federal Government, clashing, as it would, with the principles of State sovereignty, would not be tolerated?
"But I would answer, if a State possesses no sovereignty except such as is subordinate to the sovereignty of the Federal Government, would not our subordinate sovereignty be forced to yield to the superior sovereignty to which it is subordinate? Is it not a law
P. 41 Political Poison in the Public-School Books. "of nature that whenever two unequal forces meet, the inferior must yield to the superior?
"My countrymen, disguise the fact as we may, there is in this country today, and in both the political parties, an element which is ripe for a centralized despotism. There are men and corporations of vast wealth, whose iron grasp spans this whole continent, and who find it more difficult and more expensive to corrupt thirty odd State Legislatures than one Federal Congress. It was said of Nero of old that he wished the Roman people had but one head, so that he might cut it off at a single blow. And so it is with those moneyed kings who would rule this country through bribery, fraud, and intimidation.
"It is easy to see how, with all the powers of government centered at Washington in one Federal head, they could at a single stroke put an end to American liberty.
"But they well understand that before striking this blow the minds of the people must be prepared to receive it. And what surer or safer preparation could possibly be made than is now being made, by indoctrinating the minds of the rising generation with the idea that ours is already a consolidated government; that the States of the Union have no sovereignty which is not subordinate to the will and pleasure of the Federal head, and that our Constitution is the mere creature of custom, and may therefore be legally altered or abolished by custom.
"Such are a few of the pernicious and poisonous doctrines which ten millions of American children are to-day drinking in with the very definitions of the words they are compelled to study. And yet the man who dares to utter a word of warning of the approaching danger is stigmatized as an enemy to education and unfit to be mentioned as a candidate for the humblest office.
"Be it so. Viewing this great question as I do, not for all the offices in the gift of the American people would I shrink from an open and candid avowal of my sentiments. If I have learned anything from the reading of history, it is that the man who, in violation of great principles, toils for temporary fame, purchases for himself either total oblivion or eternal infamy, while he who temporarily goes down battling for right principles always deserves, and generally secures, the gratitude of succeeding ages, and will carry with him the sustaining solace of a clean conscience, more precious than all the offices and honors in the gift of man."
Korean War began in late June, 1950.
I don’t take issue with any of it. I am appalled at the information and the conclusions. A nation of ignoramuses.
Please review the final two paragraphs as quoted above. Might they not apply to all who criticize our so-called “public education system” today?
Yes, ma’am. Agreed, and not by accident. Ignorant people are easily bribed and led.
The correlation is about an individual’s ability (or not) to communicate with society. The better the communication skills, the better the chances of talking one’s way out of trouble.
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