Of course there are many degrees of literacy. I have known people who struggled with the sports pages in a red top, but could calculate darts scores in their heads. In the old days, truck drivers had to writ log books which said where they went and what they carried. At least two drivers with whom I worked had to get one of us to fill his in at the end of the week.
When I was a manager in the NHS, we sold waste food to a local guy who kept pigs. Once a month he came into our office with the invoice and his cheque book. Someone would write out the cheque and he would sign it with a squiggle.
I know at least one girl, in England, who I would consider half-literate at best. Has big trouble with reading and writing, things like spelling the word “fancy” as “facey”. She still manages to be intermittently employed and active on facebook.
How does that work? I’d imagine that if you understood the concept that letters = sounds, and you could read a little, all it would take is a little practice, and you’d be reasonably literate. Maybe not fast, and maybe you’d have to look a lot of words up, but literate nonetheless.
I’m just having a really hard time understanding this- reading is one of those things to me that’s like breathing; there’s no conscious thought involved- I just see words and know what they mean, and to a great extent, read entire sentences at once.
Coming from that perspective, it’s hard to conceive of someone who literally can’t read and who doesn’t have some sort of perceptual problem or learning disability.
Things are a bit better now, but until the 1990s star athletes could quite literally cheat their way to a degree (or at least continued academic eligibility) at major college athletic programs.
I know: it IS very hard to understand, when one has been a keen reader for ever and words are like oxygen. However, missing a lot of school for god-knows-what reason can do it.
Another thing is that even good self-motivated adult learners* tend to have developed so many strategies for avoiding having to read or write that such strategies have become quite ingrained and when one tries to give a “real-world” example of why it would be important to be able to write a shopping list or a cheque** or some similar small thing, the learner, WITHOUT meaning to be obstructive or resistant at all, might very well point out that she or he has really no need to do such things. Obviously I don’t want to infantilise an adult learner by going through a lot of cats sitting on mats or the fun times of Janet and John (probably Dick and Jane in USA?) so I do want to invent good examples of just why it could make life better to be able to do the magical word thing.
as opposed to young people just out of school and attending lessons because of parental or other pressure.
** obviously that example comes from a few decades ago and few people use cheques now, and can pay by the chip & pin card, so that makes things easier. Conversely, however, there is now so much need to be able to use a computer that any literacy problems are probably more disabling in terms of everyday life, and perhaps more embarrassing.
I’m Canadian, and most of us do not learn French, but I could navigate a car in France, or shop for groceries. For instance, I know “ecole” is school, the words for various foods, rue for street, and a whole bunch of words for other things.
I couldn’t communicate with anyone, I have no verbal skills, and no exposure to French speakers, but just growing up in an environment means you pick up a lot more than you think.
So essentially those French words are pictures for me; they are unattached to language and grammar, but I’d still find them quite useful.
People also connect numeracy with literacy, but they are really separate things.
So yeah, I can see how people get by being illiterate. They could already be compensating before they start to learn. With a little social engineering, they get by.
I had a friend who couldn’t read. Yes, we nagged him to take some classes,and he did, but he never seemed to think it was a major issue.
He knew what the street signs meant (the shape and color give important clues.) He did his banking at the teller and took his chances with things like renting, either trusting the landloard or a housemate (like me.) Day to day I doubt anyone would notice that he couldn’t read because he had learned to get by without it. He wasn’t walking around asking for help and if he did need it, he had a way of asking that didn’t tip people off that he couldn’t read.
The thing that became noticable only after I’d know him a while was that he had no book learning, obviously. No knowledge of literature, nothing from the newspaper or a magazine. All of the information services most of us take for granted were not only unavailable to him, he didn’t even know what he was missing.
One celebrity from around here who was, at one point, functionally illiterate is Jacques Demers, a former head coach of the Canadiens hockey team. After he “came out”, he acted as spokesperson for literacy campaigns.
For general North American society (as opposed to third world, immigrants, foreigners, etc.) the problem probably falls to the “don’t fail the little darlings and ruin their self-esteem” schooling.
When I started school in the 1960’s, there were a number of kids who started a year ahead, and failed so that they were headed for the grade behind mine. It might have been dyslexia, or parents’ refusal to admit they were mildly retarded (there was a school for those), or sickness or absence, or something as simple as not having their eyesight tested.
By the time I was in high school in the late 60’s, kids were advanced whether they knew the material or not. Theoretically, they were supposed to get remedial training one-on-one for their shortcomings, but … it was easier to concentrate on the larger group who also needed education.
The universities started complaining about students with incredibly poor reading, writing, and grammar skills. The worst cases most likely dropped out well before graduating high school.
Functionally illiterate? Depends on your definition of “functionally”. I’m sure there are a lot of people who recognize the words like “street”, “Sale!”, “TV”, etc. but can’t read any complex sentences or figure out unusual words. there is a large advocacy group that will tell you “whole word” reading messed up quite a few of the marginal students.
How do they survive? Judging from the quality of student worker applications I have seen in recent years (not to mention the quality of questions I get at the reference desk), they enroll in my university.
You’re greatly underestimating the amount of work it takes to learn to read and write. Particularly English, which has so many confusing phonetic exceptions and borrowed words that knowing the sounds letters usually make.
How long does it take to get to a 6th-grade reading level? Well, it takes the average person six plus years of several hours a day in a structured school environment. That’s a lot more than a little practice. You’re not picking this up in a few weekends of puzzling out sounds. And most people do it when they’re little kids and have the neural plasticity to pick up language more easily than adults can.
The people who don’t learn when they’re kids often have some kind of learning disability. Dyslexia, ADHD, etc. So a “little practice” isn’t going to be enough for them.
You’re also underestimating how socially difficult it is to get that practice as an adult.
It’s shameful to be an illiterate adult in your native language. I recently went through training to be an adult literacy tutor, and we watched a video that interviewed people who had been illiterate and learned to read and write as adults. For every single person, it was their most shameful and most carefully protected secret. One man hid it from his wife. Almost all hid it from their employers and friends. If you’re an adult with normal adult responsibilities and relationships, and you’re terrified that people will think you’re an idiot, or fire you, or leave you, when are you going to get that practice? Better not be reading Dick and Jane on your lunchbreak. Better not spend your evenings with phonics flashcards.
How do they survive? They get poorly paid jobs and keep them. There are a lot of jobs that require very limited reading and writing, or have some that can be traded to a coworker in exchange for other (harder) work. If you don’t change your job, then you can memorize what you need to do. Many have a few people that will help them out. Many of them end up criminals (I’m not saying that an illiterate person is likely to be a criminal, but they are more likely than a literate person. Convicts have a much higher illiteracy rate than average). Lots less paperwork in that line of work.
We have plenty of homeless guys who seem to be functionally (or actually) illiterate here in the library. They look at pictures in the papers. I only realized one guy couldn’t read at all when he asked to see “the air force paper” but he wanted, I forget, maybe the Washington Post - because it had airplanes in a picture on the front page.
My family sort of “adopted” an older illiterate fellow. He worked at a university as part of the grounds crew and my brother was his boss. It came time to retirement age and the fellow needed a place to stay. He had no family, and couldn’t afford a lot, so my brother decided to rent the finished attic in his house out to him. Ever since, the fellow’s been invited to all the family functions as if he was one of us. He’s a sweet guy who adores Elvis.
At the time, I wondered how he did, well, everything. The guy couldn’t sign his own name - he wrote an X when a signature was required. Eventually we did manage to teach him that, and the numbers 1 through 10. We couldn’t get the alphabet through to him reliably. He is unable to read anything, as far as I know. I believe he was kept from school as a child, along with a bad home life. I think he had the potential to grow up normal, but his life circumstances robbed him of that and he seems…well, a bit roadblocked mentally. I would almost say his bad home life created a learning disability in him that wouldn’t otherwise have been there.
He kept his job at the university his whole life. Apparently he always went to the same restaurant and got the same breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day. He memorized exactly how much he needed to give the waitress to cover the amount. Eventually the price would go up, and the waitress would explain to him that now he needed two of the lincoln bills as opposed to a lincoln and some washingtons. He would just have to trust the change he got back from people. So on like that. I think also my brother felt bad for the man and took him on as a renter as the fellow needed to start going to the doctor for a heart condition, and the number of his medications was going up. He couldn’t read the bottle, so my brother would help him memorize the amount of pills to take and when, and color code the bottles for him.
Really, as a grounds crew guy, he didn’t need a whole lot of reading and writing to get along. They would tell him where to mow the grass, trim the trees, plant the flowers, salt the sidewalks, etc, and he could do it just fine. The main way he got through life was a lot of routine, as he didn’t have any family to do things for him. I don’t believe he ever had a bank account or a driver’s license either. He was a strictly cash, walk-everywhere sort of guy. He never used the standard “the letters are too small” around us, with cards he gets in the mail he simply hands it to one of us and asks “What does this say?” (perhaps, since we are accepting of him, he doesn’t feel ashamed to ask in this way). I don’t think he has any particular desire to learn how to read at this point. He can put on an Elvis record or watch tv and have 3 meals a day in a comfortable room as his retirement. That’s all he feels he needs.
Very very few are actually “illiterate’, they are most often “functionally illiterate” which means they can read signs, maybe a comic book, the Tv guide, etc.
They’d never “read the book” just “watch the movie/show”.
How did they get that way? They skate thru HS, maybe since they are good at sports or something. I knew a dude that after he left HS, had never read a book.
Almost the same situation, but I was a waitress. 9 times out of 10 he was with another chef/cook who would just tell him what was ordered and he would make it. When he was alone in the kitchen (only during slow periods and not very often) he would pretend he was busy with stuff and you would tell him what the ticket said.
I can’t say I know how he came to be illiterate, but I know he spent a fair amount of time in jail.
The only one I know is super active on Facebook. Yep, he has an app to read the comments from others and he talks to his PC and it writes words for him. It messes up sometimes but facebook is full of bad spellings, wrong words, etc.
He travels the world and if he doesn’t know something he will just walk up to the first person in an obvious position of power, like a blue blazer, and ask for help. He absolutely depends on the kindness of strangers and it hasn’t bitten him so far.
His money comes from whatever job he can get, plus being a personal trainer and a massage therapist. Yes the test he took for the massage license was read to him by a proctor when he told them he couldn’t read. He simply remembered everything the teachers told him without ever cracking his books. He has actually earned money for voice overs for color commentary for MMA fights.
I’ve talked to his friends and they believe he is a genius and would never ever believe his reading is about that of a first grader.
