Declining Literacy – cont’d
by taxi - November 17, 2008 8:10am
This week is American Education Week.
Last week, I posted about a webpage I’d found that claimed the literacy rate among volunteers for military duty in America in the 1930′s was 98%, and that this fell off to 96% ten years later… essentially, no significant change.
Today, I found an article out of Maryland that starts off by saying that 21% of World War One draftees were illiterate. It goes on to say that, based on that high illiteracy rate, “…representatives of the National Education Association and the American Legion met in 1919 to seek ways to generate public support for education…” Apparently, whatever efforts were made to improve literacy in 1919 paid off quite well with literacy going from 79% to 98% in two short decades, and remaining basically level into World War Two.
After World War II, however, the literacy rate began sinking again, and by 1970 it was down below the levels seen in the WWI draftees. Apparently, whatever methods that were employed to bring literacy up between the first and second world wars worked, and whatever methods have been used since world war two have failed.
One thing stands out to me in all of this: it’s difficult to find dependable historical metrics after world war two that aren’t increasingly tainted by the need to make teachers look good…