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President Bush and the nation's governors just gathered
for the first national summit since the Depression. Bush
wants to be known as the education president,
so you
can guess what they discussed.
But there are some deeper issues that they probably didn't cover.
How bad are American schools. One presumed measure of a
nation's education system is its adult illiteracy rate.
We've all seen those ads that say 35 million American
adults can't read this,
which means that about 19
percent of our adult population is illiterate.
I've also seen estimates of 25 percent and 35 percent. But officially, according to the statistics which the United States provides to international bodies -- our adult illiteracy rate is about 1 percent.
Do we have two sets of figures? A real low rate that we use for impressing the rest of the world, and a much higher rate that we use when talking privately among ourselves?
Second, how important is literacy, anyway? Society seems
headed away from attaching much importance to reading
skills -- just look at the crosswalk signals. They used to
say walk
and don't walk,
and now they have
symbols.
Five years ago, computerized data transmission was a fringe activity, because you had to know how to read in order to do it. Now it's quite the rage in business circles, thanks to the fax machine, which allows any dimwit to transmit his crayon drawings.
Third, do literacy, numeracy and the other alleged benefits of education have much to do with measurable success in this life?
We frequently see horror stories about high-school
students who don't know when the Civil War occurred and who
can't find France on a map of Europe. But has anyone ever
performed the same survey on highly-paid executives? I'd
wager the results wouldn't be much different; those
subjects hold little importance in commerce, which is what
really matters in America. Recall that Henry Ford, a very
successful industrialist, observed that History is
bunk.
Even at a lower level, it is doubtful that such knowledge helps much. Most employers avoid hiring people smarter than they are. Just about everyone I know who is unemployable has an impressive IQ, and I've met a lot of stupid people with good jobs.
Fourth, even assuming literacy is good, how much do schools have to do with literacy?
Study after study demonstrates that education is essentially inherited, not acquired. The fact that most determines how much you learn is not what schools you attend, but who your parents are. If they don't care, the odds are overwhelming that you won't either, no matter how much is spent trying to educate you.
Note that in 1850, before there was widespread public schooling, 31.2 percent of the American adult population was illiterate. That year, 0.73 percent of the gross national product was spent on primary and secondary education.
Currently, 3.8 percent of the GNP goes to primary and secondary education. If only 25 percent of the adult population is illiterate, then we're actually spending $173 billion on a tiny minority of the population -- the 6.2 percent of our population that wouldn't have picked up reading and writing some other way.
If 35 percent of the adult population is illiterate, then we've gone backward in the past 139 years, and our nation has wasted $2.18 trillion that could have been better spent elsewhere.
But then again, maybe only 1 percent of our adults can't read or write. And perhaps it isn't all that important to read and write in an era of television and telephones anyway.
Who knows? President Bush told the governors that The
time for study is over,
but it appears that the time
for study is just starting. We don't know if it is a
problem, we don't know the extent of the problem, and we
don't know if schools of any kind can solve the problem.
Perhaps it is true that ignorance is bliss,
because
the President did smile as he spoke.
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