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Many hands were wrung last week when the results of a statewide literacy assessment were released. Nearly a third of all third-graders failed to meet standards, and writing scores were even worse.
Some educators responded that they were working to improve student reading and writing, but that there are only so many hours in a day.
They're right, and it may be that the low scores reflect, not a failure on the part of teachers, but a major defect in the way we structure education in this country.
The modern American public school system arose after the Civil War, in conjunction with the spread of industrial mass-production in the United States.
Observers of the time were awed by the power of industry -- many tasks that formerly took hours of back-breaking labor, like harvesting wheat or breaking rocks, could suddenly be performed on an immense scale with much less labor.
Little wonder that they were impressed, and this probably explains why our schools got organized along an industrial-process model: start with some fairly standardized raw materials, process them in a specified ways, and get predictable results.
This continues to work pretty well for converting wheat into bread, or ores into ingots. But for something as variable as human children, a standardized process may work for many, but not all.
Schools used to winnow out the material that wouldn't fit their process: special-education, tracking, high drop-out rates, etc. These filters kept the main process flow going.
But expectations have changed with mainstreaming, the parental distrust of tracking and a social emphasis on not dropping out. So the schools end up using a standard model to serve an increasingly diverse population, and little wonder that they run into problems. Educational methods, based on a mass-production industrial model, that might have served a bare majority are now expected to serve nearly all the student population.
Some change is inevitable, though it will be slow, given the entrenched nature of the current system. Meanwhile, let us ponder whether reading and writing skills will matter all that much when today's third- and fourth-graders become adults.
As nearly as I can tell, we're working hard to create a society where literacy doesn't matter.
For instance, consider criticism. The New Yorker publishes lengthy and literate reviews of movies, and it's losing money by the carload. Meanwhile, the profitable media outlets thrive with reviews that consist of short and snappy symbols -- one to four stars, a traffic signal with red and orange and green indicators, or, at the simplest, two thumbs which might be either up or down.
As for the movies themselves, you can be perfectly incapable of reading or writing, and still enjoy a film. Hollywood takes in more money than ever now, something you can't say for print media like books, magazines and newspapers, all of which require literacy.
Television, another medium which requires absolutely nothing in the way of literacy from the viewer, is also thriving and continues to grow. Political candidates feel that they have to use it, and it's expensive, so candidates are always begging from the rich, who will understandably make sure their interests are served.
Computers and their communications represent another symptom of the declining need for literacy. Not all that long ago, you had to know how to read and write to use a computer with its command-line interface. Now you merely need to point and click.
The Internet, in its primitive form of about 1994, offered mostly text which moved quickly into your computer. Now it's full of flashy graphics, blinking and whirling symbols which take a long time to load.
These images add nothing to the information you may be seeking, but they do entertain the non-literate, and they keep the website advertising in front of you while you're waiting impatiently.
That's a start on how America is moving toward non-literacy, and it makes one wonder what would happen if the schools actually succeeded in making all students into competent readers and writers.
When they became adults, they might spend quiet evenings at home reading, rather than having their living rooms invaded by loud and spectacular advertising spiels. They'd start demanding more than sound bites and photo ops from political candidates, and they'd apply real analysis, rather than thumb-counting, to what they read and heard.
Society as we know it would probably collapse under those circumstances, so it's probably just as well that there wasn't any marked improvement in those statewide literacy assessments.
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