Thursday 25 October 2001

Pic of the day: Scientific American, October 2001.

Dysliteracy

"Can't read, can't count". I saw this rather disturbing article in Scientific American, the October issue. It claimed that around one third of high school seniors lacked the elementary reading and arithmetic skills needed for a normal life. They could write their name and read street signs, but they could not understand a passage from a book or fill in a tax form. They could count, but not do basic arithmetic or take measurements.

Of course, our society does not expect high school seniors to need all life skills all by themselves. Most of them will be staying with parents for quite a while yet, and later they will share their skills and draw on the help of friends. After all, since two out of three are literate, chances are that there will be quite a few of them among your friends or at your workplace, perhaps some even in your family.

Even so, unless they improve fast during the next couple of years, they will have a rather limited choice of careers before them. These days, you don't need to have an office job to need at least basic reading comprehension. Job training is slowed down quite a bit if you are not able to take notes and use these for repetition, and if you cannot read a simple handbook or written instruction. With all due respect for training videos, written instructions are much handier. And there are only so many jobs at hamburger bars. Certainly not enough for one third of the population.

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A couple years ago, I read that ca 23% of Swedish youngsters were supposed to grow up without the mental qualifications for functioning in the information age. I'd like to be able to say that it is different here in Norway, but I'm hard pressed to see how. We surely are not at American levels, for a couple reasons. Firstly, we are a very egalitarian society. You get the same opportunity for basic education regardless of where you live and who your father is. Second, we don't have much in the way of minority groups. Most notably, we don't have a fairly large black underclass of former slaves, and these really stood out on the American statistics. We do have a couple groups with their own languages, mostly the aboriginal Saami people and the Pakistani immigrants. But they are not numerous enough to strongly influence statistics. I'm not sure how badly they fare, but the fact that they are bilingual probably works against them. The Saami are however fairly well integrated in Norwegian society, these days.

The differences between Norway and Sweden are rather small, in terms of educational policy as well as genetic stock and cultural values. So it is a safe bet that around one in five Norwegian teens at least face a future where they simply won't be able to earn their own money on a regular basis. They also risk accidents, and not least they risk being exploited by cynical members of the reading classes.

The Internet is certainly not going to make the differences less. For us highly literate types, who even know a foreign language, it is easy to recognize such scams as pyramid schemes even when camouflaged as "multi level marketing". For people who use the Internet mainly to look at the pretty pictures, if at all, the first time they hear about it is when a friend tries to recruit them. While this may be fun while it lasts, it also means that they lose some of the little money they have. And so on with other things. If you don't have a sense of numbers, it is hard to guess what is the proper price of something. We can look up alternative suppliers on the Internet and compare the prices; but this would be a huge task for someone who is barely literate. And so on and on.

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But what can be done about it? I really don't think there is much to do. By the time people are 16, it's a bit late to teach them to read. Still, it is certainly worth a try. Some people get a lot more motivated for school when they have worked long hours for a lousy pay a couple years.

But at the very least, I wish we could put an end to the practice of paying slightly retarded women to breed. It is a dubious service to them, and an unkind act against their poor offspring. Rather we should pay these women – and the corresponding men for that matter – to not have children. Seriously. It would cost the society less in the long run. Yes, it would be kind of insulting. But it is not much of a honor to belong to a hereditary underclass, the like of which we see in several other countries already. Better to insult one generation than ten.

Of course, it is possible that in the future, we will be able to repair the dysfunction that lead to illiteracy. Then again, the way things are drifting these days, it is just as likely that society will eventually abandon these people to starvation if times get really tough. And we really don't want it to go that far, do we?