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Can Our Children Write, and Who Cares?
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13606 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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4 / 1988 |
2,314 Words |
| Author
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Marcy McDonald Kursel
Marcy McDonald Kursel is an organizer of and reviewer for
Henrico Country's program in assessing high school writing.
She is presently writing a book on the nature of literacy. |
In thinking about anything you have written today, it may be useful to note that one-fourth of America is illiterate. To say that seventeen to twenty-seven million Americans are functionally illiterate and another forty-six million only marginally literate means, by definition, that they cannot write. Literacy refers to writing as well as reading abilities; the two are intrinsically linked. Reading is the passive side of literacy, the intake of knowledge. Writing activates that knowledge and makes it productive: reading is the recipe, writing the cooking. Without the ensuring possibilities for transformation--in this case, words into food--reading offers pleasure to the reader, but gives little else to society.
Nevertheless, few people consider writing skills when they contemplate the grim reports on illiteracy that have filled the news over the last several years. Even fewer have any idea how to improve the situation. One government report estimates that only 5 percent of the functional illiterates in this country are reached by literacy programs, yet in 1985 over $112 million in federal funds were spend on such programs.
Writing is fundamental not only to communication, but also to the economy. Adult illiteracy costs the nation an estimated $224 billion a year in welfare, crime, lost taxes, remedial education, and inadequate job performance. Incompetency on the job forces businesses to become educators, for it is increasingly difficult to find employees with basic competency in reading, writing, and verbal problem solving. This year American businesses will spend more than thirty billion dollars on training programs to improve vocabulary, writing, reasoning skills, and other abilities. They are doing so because they need "workers who … know how to think and can communicate what they're thinking," according to David Kearns, Xerox's chairman and chief executive officer.
Writing increases one's ability to think and speak by its very process, which demands discipline, logic, and organization. Clear communication--a difficult task for everyone--is easier if everyone follows the same rules.
Educators in the sixties warned, however, that following rules stifled creativity and bruised egos; this attitude still reflects the opinion of many experts in the field. More recently, other experts have proposed strict guidelines for revamping education by "getting back to the basics"--increasing the number of papers written, for example, and emphasizing mathematics and
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