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Earl Mills, a yacht manufacturer from New Bern, N.C., graduated high school in 1971, raised a family and held the same job, all the while able to read at only a second-grade level. He was 48 when he finished reading his first book.
What he cherishes most about this midlife gift is something more intimate: being able to express his love through the written word.
“To be able to write your spouse a little love note on a Post-it and put it in their lunch pail — now that’s something special,” said Mills, who now works with ProLiteracy Worldwide, a nonprofit advocacy and education group that has branches in Missouri.
Literacy is more than making sense out of shapes on paper. As a person’s literacy level goes up, so does his or her education level. As education levels rise, so do individual and, collectively, national incomes. Literacy levels in adults can even predict how likely they are to vote, volunteer their time or work out as well as how healthy, on average, they claim to feel.
About five years ago, the U.S. Department of Education conducted a massive literacy assessment and found that Americans’ average literacy levels hadn’t changed much since the previous study in 1992; they are on par with those in 19 other developed countries. Five states, including Missouri, did similar assessments and confirmed on a statewide level what the National Assessment of Adult Literacy found. The state assessment found that Missourians read on a slightly higher level than the national average.
But another picture began to emerge through other avenues. Book sales declined; employers realized their workers lacked the communication skills needed to do new types of jobs; and groups pushing for health care reform noticed the literacy level needed to navigate health care in this country is higher than it used to be.
Government agencies, advocacy groups, adult educators and others began scratching around for information. Through re-examinations of the assessment and through other trends, they found:
— As the U.S. trades its old manufacturing jobs for high-tech computer jobs, fewer and fewer Americans have the literacy and other skills employers need their employees to have.
— A child’s literacy level increases with the number of books at home, but the number of books any adult is likely to read and keep in the home grows smaller each year.
— About $238 billion worth of medical-related mistakes are made each year in the U.S. because of citizens’ low health literacy.
— In a seemingly borderless global civilization, there were still 7 million illiterate adults in the U.S. in 2003 (out of about 254 million adults).
And in a 2007 academic report, “America’s Perfect Storm,” Andrew Sum, a professor in labor economics at Northeastern University in Boston, found by 2030, the average literacy levels of U.S. adults will have decreased by 5 percent. The report examined the marginal improvement in literacy skills shown by Americans in the national assessment over the past 15 years.
If Sum’s prediction is correct, it will be the first time in U.S. history that a generation is replaced with one less educated. Already this is evident in the workplace, at home and in the chronic illiteracy that persists in American society.
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