The Cost of an Illiterate Society
With many problems facing the American society today, people tend to get sidetrack when looking just at the surface of all these “problems”, when they should be focusing on the internal problems within our great American nation. One of these problems is the concept of an illiterate society, and the effect it has on these illiterate people, and the people around them. Illiteracy: The condition or quality of being ignorant or unknowledgeable in a particular subject or field, basically in shorter a shorter term, not being able to read or write. This is one of the major problems facing American, and it is definitely not stopping now. Illiteracy in American had continued to grow. In September of 1993, the most comprehensive representation ever available on the condition of illiteracy in this nation was released by the U.S. Department of Education. The National Adult Literacy Survey, also known as the ALS, evaluated the skills of adults in three areas. Those three areas were prose, document and quantitative proficiency. There were five levels of literacy that were assigned to people, 1 being the lowest and 5 being the highest. 23 percent of the people tested, 40 to 44 million adults were at Level 1, the lowest of five levels. This
Teaching children and adults to read is the most important objective educators have to accomplish. Reading is a prerequisite for everything else, not only in school but in life itself. Try to image not being able to read is the number one question you should ask yourself. From the time your wake up to the time you go to bed, reading is essential in your day to day basis. Without it, life cannot be fully lived to the limit. As accounted for in the 1986 publication entitled Making Literacy Programs Work: A Practical Guide for Correctional Educators , specifically for the U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Corrections, one-half of all adults in federal and state correctional institutions cannot read or write at all. Only about one-third of Those who cannot read and write are severely obstructed from contribution in a society, without access to the information necessary to make an intelligent decision. Of necessity, illiterates must rely on others to provide the information to them. One outcome of this is the increasing prison population, now with an estimated total of 2 million people. According to several studies, the prison population represents the single highest concentration of illiterate US adults. According to the National Education Association, 41 percent of English speaking whites are illiterate, 22 percent are English speaking African Americans, 22 percent are Spanish speaking and 15 percent are non-English speaking people. They geography of these people follows as 51 percent live in small towns and suburbs, 41 percent live in urban areas and 8 percent live in rural areas. 40 percent of these adults are from the age of 29 years old to the age 39 years old. 28 percent are age 40 to 59, and 32 percent are 60 or older. at the s
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Approximate Word count = 1193
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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