Some programmes wisely instituted on the Federal or state level in America deal with malnutrition. The Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), school breakfast and lunch programmes, the Summer Food Service Program – all have been shown to work, although they do not get to all the people who need them. So rich a country is well able to provide enough food for all its children.
Some deleterious effects of undernutrition can be undone; iron-repletion therapy, for example, can repair some consequences of iron-deficiency anaemia. But not all of the damage is reversible. Dyslexia – various disorders that impair reading skills -may affect fifteen per cent of us or more, rich and poor alike. Its causes (whether biological, psychological or environmental) are often undetermined. But methods now exist to help many with dyslexia to learn to read.
No one should be unable to learn to read because education is unavailable. But there are many schools in America in which reading is taught as a tedious and reluctant excursion into the hieroglyphics of an unknown civilization, and many classrooms in which not a single book can be found. Sadly, the demand for adult literacy classes far outweighs the supply. High-quality early education programmes such as Head Start can be enormously successful in preparing children for reading. But Head Start reaches only a third to a quarter of eligible pre-schoolers, many of its programmes have been enfeebled by cuts in funding, and it and the nutrition programmes mentioned are under renewed Congressional attack as I write.
Head Start is criticized in a 1994 book called The Bell Curve by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray. Their argument has been characterized by Gerald Coles of the University of Rochester:
First, inadequately fund a program for poor children, then deny whatever success is achieved in the face of overwhelming obstacles, and finally conclude that the program must be eliminated because the children are intellectually inferior.
The book, which received surprisingly respectful attention from the media, concludes that there is an irreducible hereditary gap between blacks and whites – about 10 or 15 points on IQ tests. In a review, the psychologist Leon J. Kamin concludes that ‘[t]he authors repeatedly fail to distinguish between correlation and causation’ – one of the fallacies of our baloney detection kit.
The National Center for Family Literacy, based in Louisville, Kentucky, has been implementing programmes aimed at low-income families to teach both children and their parents to read. It works like this: the child, 3 to 4 years old, attends school three days a week along with a parent, or possibly a grandparent or guardian. While the grown-up spends the morning learning basic academic skills, the child is in a pre-school class. Parent and child meet for lunch and then ‘learn how to learn together’ for the rest of the afternoon.
A follow-up study of fourteen such programmes in three states revealed: (1) although all of the children had been designated as being at risk for school failure as pre-schoolers, only ten per cent were still rated at risk by their current elementary school teachers. (2) More than 90 per cent were considered by their current elementary school teachers as motivated to learn. (3) Not one of the children had to repeat any grade in elementary school.
The growth of the parents was no less dramatic. When asked to describe how their lives had changed as a result of the family literacy programme, typical responses described improved self-confidence (nearly every participant) and self-control, passing high-school equivalency exams, admission to college, new jobs, and much better relations with their children. The children are described as more attentive to parents, eager to learn and – in some cases for the first time – hopeful about the future. Such programmes could also be used in later grades for teaching mathematics, science and much else.
Tyrants and autocrats have always understood that literacy, learning, books and newspapers are potentially dangerous. They can put independent and even rebellious ideas in the heads of their subjects. The British Royal Governor of the Colony of Virginia wrote in 1671:
I thank God there are no free schools nor printing; and I hope we shall not have [them] these [next] hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them and libels against the best government. God keep us from both!
But the American colonists, understanding where liberty lies, would have none of this.
In its early years, the United States boasted one of the highest -perhaps the highest – literacy rates in the world. (Of course, slaves and women didn’t count in those days.) As early as 1635, there had been public schools in Massachusetts, and by 1647 compulsory education in all townships there of more than fifty ‘households’. By the next century and a half, educational democracy had spread all over the country. Political theorists came from other countries to witness this national wonder: vast numbers of ordinary working people who could read and write. The American devotion to education for all propelled discovery and invention, a vigorous democratic process, and an upward mobility that pumped the nation’s economic vitality.
Today, the United States is not the world leader in literacy. Many of those judged literate are unable to read and understand very simple material – much less a sixth-grade textbook, an instruction manual, a bus schedule, a mortgage statement, or a ballot initiative. And the sixth-grade textbooks of today are much less challenging than those of a few decades ago, while the literacy requirements at the workplace have become more demanding than ever before.
The gears of poverty, ignorance, hopelessness and low self-esteem mesh to create a kind of perpetual failure machine that grinds down dreams from generation to generation. We all bear the cost of keeping it running. Illiteracy is its linchpin.
Even if we hardened our hearts to the shame and misery experienced by the victims, the cost of illiteracy to everyone else is severe – the cost in medical expenses and hospitalization, the cost in crime and prisons, the cost in special education, the cost in lost productivity and in potentially brilliant minds who could help solve the dilemmas besetting us.
Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom. But reading is still the path.
Frederick Douglass After the Escape
When he was barely twenty, he ran away to freedom. Settling in New Bedford with his bride, Anna Murray, he worked as a common labourer. Four years later Douglass was invited to address a meeting. By that time, in the North, it was not unusual to hear the great orators of the day – the white ones, that is – railing against slavery. But even many of those opposed to slavery thought of the slaves themselves as somehow less than human. On the night of 16 August 1841, on the small island of Nantucket, the members of the mostly Quaker Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society leaned forward in their chairs to hear something new: a voice raised in opposition to slavery by someone who knew it from bitter personal experience.
His very appearance and demeanour destroyed the then-prevalent myth of the ‘natural servility’ of African-Americans. By all accounts his eloquent analysis of the evils of slavery was one of the most brilliant debuts in American oratorical history. William Lloyd Garrison, the leading abolitionist of the day, sat in the front row. When Douglass finished his speech, Garrison rose, turned to the stunned audience, and challenged them with a shouted question: ‘Have we been listening to a thing, a chattel personal, or a man?’
‘A man! A man!’ the audience roared back as one voice.
‘Shall such a man be held a slave in a Christian land?’ called out Garrison.
‘No! No!’ shouted the audience.
And even louder, Garrison asked: ‘Shall such a man ever be sent back to bondage from the free soil of Old Massachusetts?’
And now the crowd was on its feet, crying out ‘No! No! No!’
He never did return to slavery. Instead, as an author, editor and publisher of journals, as a speaker in America and abroad, and as the first African-American to occupy a high advisory position in the US government, he spent the rest of his life fighting for human rights. During the Civil War, he was a consultant to President Lincoln. Douglass successfully advocated the arming of ex-slaves to fight for the North, Federal retaliation against Confederate prisoners-of-war for Confederate summary execution of captured African-American soldiers, and freedom for the slaves as a principal objective of the war.
Many of his opinions were scathing, and ill-designed to win him friends in high places:
I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the South is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes – a justifier of the most appalling barbarity, a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me … I … hate the corrupt, slavehold-ing, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.