Since being able to read is important in today’s society, how do illiterate people manage to function? How can they get jobs, for example? (Or do they?)
How do they do, well, just about anything?
Just because they’re illiterate, doesn’t mean they aren’t perceptive or intelligent.
No one ever asks how people live in foreign countries where they don’t speak or write the language, and that’s even worse.
They get people (usually children or other relatives) to read things/write things for them:
children get “Ok, this is a fun test - can you read me this to show how well you read?” or “ok, honey, show off your lovely handwriting for the nice lady.”
relatives/strangers get “oh, I forgot my reading glasses, can you help me fill this out - the type is too small.” or “These spaces are so small, can you go ahead and just fill them in so I don’t mess up?”
They recognize places based on sign colors or shapes - obvious things like restaurants, but even things like bus stops or subway stations often have colors or shapes associated with them, and even illiterate people know that their stop is the only one that starts with A on the red line, for instance.
They trust that people aren’t scamming them when they sign documents and give out their information. This is the part that I worry about, because so many older people are scammed anyway - it has to be much more worrisome to be told to sign something and not have any way to know if it actually is what they’re saying it is.
They’re doing manual labor, or being supported by someone else or the state, or in prison. Some people may be illiterate but acquire valuable skills over time. Heavy equipment operators can make decent money, as can some factory workers. Someone can be illiterate yet still be intelligent, and I’ve never been impressed with the average person’s reading comprehension ability.
I’ve seen little children at Comp USA (are they still in business) playing
video games and they didn’t know how to read, but they sure knew how
to push those buttons on the controlers.
My son tried to get a job picking tomato’s, but being an American born/English
speaking person they would not hire him due to he would not be able to understand the foreman, who only spoke spanish.
How do you know they didn’t know how to read?
Can’t resist wondering if OP was inspired by this thread, about the New Jersey neo-Nazi who showed up in court to argue for child custody, all decked out in his full dress splendiferous Nazi military regalia – and who, it was noted in linked articles, is illiterate.
It was also noted in said linked articles, that he’s a life-long unemployed. So much for earning a living.
In Post #3 of that thread, nearwildheaven states that the family got along by defrauding SSI. So they managed to muddle along after all.
The only illiterate person I know is a cook at a restaurant. I really only interact with him when he comes to my store to pick stuff up and honestly, I knew him for probably 10 years before someone told me he couldn’t read. He’ll come in with a list of things he needs and say something like “I need lettuce and tomatoes and gee, I can’t read his [the chef’s] handwritting” and I would take the slip and just get the stuff. After a while someone clued me into why he says that he can’t read the handwritting so I wouldn’t say “Huh, it’s not that bad today, I can read it, it says…”. But now, in an effort to not make him feel bad, I just say “Whaddaya need” as I sort of reach for the paper in his hand" I’ve told my employees to do the same instead of letting him sit there pretending to struggle with the handwritting.
I’m sure that’s one of his coping mechanisms. Just act like he can’t read someone’s handwritting, he’s probably got other ways to get around other situations and and I’m sure sometimes he just has to flat out tell people he can’t read. On the one hand, you’d think it would make sense to just go take some night classes to start learning how to read. Even a second or third grade reading level would be better then nothing. OTOH, maybe it’s just not worth the effort, time and money for someone that’s made it this far in life and probably has no intention of being anything more then a cook anyways.
I’m functionally illiterate.
In Chinese and since I live in Taiwan, that’s a problem. But, you find ways to get around. For me, it’s easy, since I’m not completely illiterate, as I read many of the characters since I know Japanese. I do have friends who can’t read any.
You get around it. Have someone help you with what’s important. My wife is native Taiwanese so I don’t have to go that far.
It’s interesting to experience how much you can function in life without being able to read, let alone knowing a language.
Lots of farangs (Westerners) over here are not even functionally literate in Thai, but there’s plenty of English language around, at least in the urban areas where they’re most likely to settle. But many Burmese and Cambodians live here working manual labor, and they come from societies with radically different alphabets. They get by okay.
But a lot of Thais also can’t read. It’s only recently that more than six years of schooling were required, but even back then lots of children weren’t sent to school, kept at home instead to work on the farm. This was especially true of girls, many of whose families until recently never saw much sense in sending them to school and teaching them to read or write. Boys maybe, but girls? Get outta here!
The thing I don’t understand is, barring being illiterate in a second language, how do you get to be illiterate in the first place?
I mean, if you were born and raised in America, wouldn’t reading just sort of come to you eventually, as if by osmosis? Or with a minor amount of exposition - “The letter A makes the long a and short a sounds.” kind of thing, wouldn’t you pick it up? And languages other than English might be even easier, due to more rigorous grammar rules.
I just don’t get how people can be illiterate in this day and age; literacy isn’t the province of the clergy or nobles, and it seems almost like you have to go way out of your way to not be literate, or be somehow learning disabled in some fashion.
Or be kept off school by bad parents, or to help out with younger kids. Or perhaps be horribly bullied at school, avoid it for a bit , then feel so behind you feel you’d never catch up.
Yes, I also find it utterly weird to think of not being able to read, but it does happen, and people I have had as adult literacy students have been perfectly nice people with jobs like chambermaid or office cleaner - that sort of thing.
Redskins defensive end Dexter Manley made it through college illiterate. He had all sorts of methods of passing so that people never noticed.
Oh heck! That’s weird that he got to college. :eek:
My maternal step-grandfather was profoundly illiterate. He died in the early 80’s but I would still consider that “modern society”. He could recognize his own name but that’s about it. He was about average intelligence, but he was belligerent about learning how to read. It just wasn’t going to happen.
He made a decent living working in a union shop factory. Don’t know if what he did then would still exist today.
But even when I was a young kid I couldn’t figure out how a guy could go through his life not being able to read at all.
Many people considered illiterate by some standard or another have some minimal reading skills. But if you do not learn to read at a young age it becomes more difficult as you get older. In addition, many people who fail to achieve some basic level of literacy suffer from vision or perception problems, or even more serious learning disabilities. Even for young children some degree of motivation is necessary to learn. And then there are those who for a variety of reasons do not get to go to school, or at least an adequate school.
Our colleges have graduated a lot of illiterate athletes.
Three anecdatas, all told before:
My school had (well, still has) this policy of pairing students who struggle with some subjects with others that excel at them. This is advantageous to both students, as well as to the class group. I got to teach one of my classmates, who “didn’t see letters right”, how to read. A few years ago I found out that she, in turn, had taught her 1-year-older sister; they’re the only two people who can read and write in a family whose lastname should have been Dyslexic… on both sides! They’ve got notary powers for over two score relatives, up to cousins and cousins’ children; any paperwork a relative needs to tackle, they’re there. According to the elder sister, “the most important thing you taught us was ‘don’t be afraid to ask’” - once “dyslexia” joined the general vocabulary, their job as family advocates became a lot easier (at the same time, our local City Hall credits them with having pointed out the general unreadability of some forms, leading to said forms being made clearer). The generation that’s currently in school gets tested for dyslexia as soon as possible; so far they’re about 50:50.
A coworker in a factory was officially literate. Seriously. Promise. Never mind that he could take a document upside-down and not realize it (he’d grumble about “foreigners writing funny”). How was he able to work? Well, on one hand, if the paper was right-side-up, he was able to find certain keywords which were enough for his job; on the other, he always worked with a partner (who also was one of the two people in the factory who understood his accent).
At one point I took part in an international project involving several factories in Europe and one in South Africa. At one point, one of the people from ZA explained that most of their workers were illiterate: foremen on up had to be able to read and figure (±* and short division), with most managers being college graduates. When someone needed, say, 5 liters of ammonia, they’d give a photocopy of the label to a worker and tell him “go to the place where open bottles are kept and bring the one with this label. If there isn’t one with this label tell me”. Then later they’d send him again for a full bottle (or two, if there hadn’t been one already open).
One of the benefits of the project for that factory: “we’re having so many people asking to join the read and write classes that we’re thinking of hiring a second teacher! People are asking can they sign up, can their relatives sign up, can their neighbors sign up! And it’s all because they’ve seen the foremen go everywhere with the manuals and the most daring ones asked ‘what are you doing with that?’”
Someone who was on the same conference call pointed out “it’s called ‘literacy’ classes” “oh no honey, you don’t know my boys, if I said a word like that they’d start running and not stop til Madagascar, and for those who don’t know, Madagascar’s an island. It’s the read and write classes.” You could hear the South Africans’ grins through the phone :)
I was briefly involved with an NGO teaching illiterate people (by the way the main issue is to find them. Even if they would want to learn, and aren’t actually too ashamed of being illiterate to even ask for a remedy, they’re unlikely to find the NGO. So, the NGO had to actively search for them).
IME, the wide majority were adult immigrants, mostly women. Also, some Romas who were functionally illiterate. But to my surprise, there were some cases of people born in France and not mentally challenged who managed to reach adulthood without learning how to read and write. Generally they skipped school for the most part and their parents didn’t do anything about it. But in one case, the father kept his son working on the farm rather than sending him to school. Like it happened 150 years ago, or still happens in developing countries.
My father worked on the NY Thruway. A trucker asked him for directions; told take the road South, he asked, what does that look like? A long-distance trucker that couldn’t read a map or a sign? At least 3 decades ago.
That’s nice of you! 
That’s what I’ve seen, and also sort of what Joey P is referring to. I read an article about adult illiteracy (it’s in Dutch, as so often when I tell you guys something I read, but I’ll see if I can find it…). There was a guy working as a joiner, and he did just fine. Then one day his company introduced paperwork, how many screws you used per job, where you drove to, that sort of thing. So he took that home every night and did it with his wife. Then they had to start doing it on the job. He said he thought about quitting, rather than just saying he didn’t know how to write.
My colleagues in Brazil were mostly illiterate. They usually asked me to do any reading and writing “because the letters are so small” or “because my handwriting is messy” or “I forgot my reading glasses”. Besides that small amount of work-related writing I doubt they needed to be literate for anything, ever.
Then there are people with mild intellectual disabilities. They often come across completely normal (yes, they are normal, I mean that you wouldn’t notice they have an intellectual disability unless you know what to look for). So it’s often surprising when you find they are illiterate. Of course, they are taught to read and write quite intensively, but it remains very difficult or impossible for them and for that reason they almost never do it. We did teach them to just ask if you need help, most people will tell you what a sign says and be nice about it. Since it was our work to get them jobs, we could of course explain their level of reading and writing to an employer, so that would just never be a problem. For everything else they just make do: look for shapes and colours to give you a clue. But there isn’t much that you need to do that for. If they’re going somewhere new on their own they’ll ask about which underground line to take, rather than looking at the schedule.
Perhaps the most difficult thing for them is that you can’t be private about finding information. If they want to know something about hemorrhoids they can’t pick up a pamphlet at the doctor’s, they need to ask.
It all works much better if there is no stigma involved: if you can just say it people will help you, and those who could learn would feel happy to get lessons. Unfortunately, I don’t see that happening.