As a traveler, I’ve been in many cities, or on many buses, in which a majority of the people were illiterate, could not read or write anything at all, had never been to school. They’re no different from anybody else, they just can’t read or write. Otherwise, they function perfectly well in their social environment.
I was a service advisor at a car dealership and one of the mechanics was completely illiterate. At first when he asked me to read my work orders to him I assumed he didn’t read English (he was Mexican) but finally someone told me he couldn’t read Spanish either.
ETA sadly, he did not function perfectly well, as doing mechanical tasks does require the ability to read things.
I worked with a guy who faked his way through inability to read or write all the way into his 30’s. He finally got found out when he started a job where he didn’t have an assistant to generate all the paperwork. Suddenly we got reports that said things like, “he say do but no” (and literally nothing else.)
My boss asked me if I could “coach” him, and after a single session I said, “He doesn’t need to be taught HOW to write, he needs to learn to write, period.”
And how did it turn out, kunilou? Did he learn to write?
I don’t know. My boss fired him, he talked his way into another job, then got fired from that, and then I lost contact.
I’ve had numerous patients on my caseload who are illiterate or functionally illiterate. Some can write their names, (somewhat like drawing a picture) some can only make an X.
I recently ran into a patient age 61 who is functionally illiterate. He says his family took him out of school most days of the week beginning in 2nd grade, which just astounds me. I was in school in the same time period and cannot imagine the school system simply ignoring a child coming to school only one or two days a week.
Another patient was born in the 1910’s and said his parents pulled him out of school to work in on the farm after grade 2 or 3. He would save letters for me to read on my weekly visit, I would fill out the money orders he would buy, and I would take dictated letters to his granddaughter in prison.
Honestly, one thing I have found is that illiterate people are NOT stupid, it take a great deal of intelligence to survive in this world without being able to read and write.
I’ve worked with people like that. They were speakers of Mayan and K’iche’ from southern Mexico and Guatemala. We would teach them how to write in Spanish, first, because they knew a little bit of it, and then move to English. It’s a long process.
Yes, that’s what I have learned, too. Teaching adult literacy requires very different skills than teaching children to read, and it’s hard to find effective adult literacy instructors. Usually adult literacy is done by organizations that rely upon volunteers. Add to that the stigma one faces when learning to read as an adult, and you can understand how someone could avoid it for so long, instead developing highly deft ways of getting along without literacy.
My neighbors out here in the mountains, an older couple, are, I’m pretty sure, functionally illiterate.
One April, they asked me if I could answer a question about income tax. After glancing at the pile of papers on the dining table, I declined to help, and suggested that they should consult a professional.
Turns out they owned a pile of shares in a certain Atlanta soft drink company. Had been buying them for about 50 years. Illiterate doesn’t equal dumb.
Good thing that ritual hasn’t completely faded. When the wife and I moved to our new house last Spring, she got distracted by something while writing a $12,400.00 check for the movers. A week later I noticed some expensive stuff had gotten broken during the move and hidden away – very obviously concealed from us – and I was pretty pissed off but unwilling to make it into a drawn-out small claims court matter. It was months later when I was finally filing away and reconciling receipts that I realized the bank had stuck with her Twelve Thousand and no/100 Dollars as the legally binding amount to pull from our account and give to the moving company. Nobody at the company complained about what they received, so I just figured the $400 discrepancy merely balanced out the damaged paintings.
–G!
My experience in Korea was a different kind of eye-opener for me. I had taken Spanish, Russian, and Japanese to fulfill various educational requirements. By the time I went to Japan to teach English conversation, I still remembered enough of each to get around and have some basic functional exchanges with natives (called passable speaking, rather than fluent speaking) but didn’t really think much of it.
Then in early May a bunch of us new teachers were sent to Korea to finalize our work papers. I was looking out the window as the plane landed in Seoul, gazing at the billboards with Korean writing and thinking, “Wow! So this is what it’s like to be illiterate!”
I could recognize the “wave” on the side of the Coca Cola building (plus the HiC logo which is one of their sub-brands) and very little else. It was disconcerting.
–G!
Our office was given a presentation a few years ago on how the Government of Canada’s payment processing centre handled cheque processing. The machine scanned the cheque, checked the date (ignoring post-dated, which is not a legal impediment on cashing the cheque, but identifying stale-dated ones), checked for a signature, then compared the numeral value and written value. Any discrepancies, or illegible entries (and they were remarkably good at deciphering written amounts), were kicked out for manual review, not ignored. We were told that this was the standard technology level for current automated processing.
During the mid-90s, I volunteered for an illiteracy Red Cross program. I too was astounded to meet a guy who was pulled out of school by his father to work on the farm most of the time (he was about 25, so it would have been around 1980, I guess). Like you I wondered how it was even possible. The social worker in charge told me he wasn’t the only case (even though the wide majority of participants were immigrants or Roma).
My grandmother too was pulled out of school to work on the farm, but she still was literate, and it was before 1910.
Well, we are much closer now to 2100. Maybe your bank is extremely risk adverse regarding how fast they think you’re gonna take to use up the book. 
Actually, with the bill pay feature I might actually be in danger of still being on the same checkbook in 83 years.
There is nothing amusing about illiteracy, but…in one of Jack Vance’s books there is a poster saying, “Illiterate? Write for help.”
Not so well when their social environment is in a country with compulsory schooling. Part of it is the stigma: in these environments, many people who can’t read don’t want to admit it, so they don’t ask for help when they should. But if the reason you can’t find the name of the sender is not that the form is in German but that you’re holding it upside-down (time and again), then yeah, your coworkers will figure it out.
I didn’t get them from the bank. I ordered them from Vistaprint. Incredibly cheap.
My IL has some property in Michigan. A couple in their 30s who live down the road act as caretakers. The husband cannot read or write. Really nice guy, hard worker, can fix ANYTHING. The wife is an RN and their 2 young kids are in grade school.
In a situation like that, I would like to think I would try to learn reading and writing along with my grade school kids. But I didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to learn Spanish/French/German with my kids when they were in school.
My ESL student doesn’t take advantage of studying English alongside his 5 yr-old daughter. The other day we were meeting at the library, and he met a friend of his teenage son’s. Instead of speaking with the young man in English, he spoke in Spanish. He later told me that the boy’s Spanish was not very good. It is kind of frustrating to work with a student a couple of hours a week, but to see them pass up easy opportunities to practice their skills outside of our sessions. And my guy is at least going to our sessions. I can imagine an illiterate person figuring that they get along “well enough” as they are, and generally have someone who will read and write for them. Even tho that is a hassle, they must think it less of a hassle than trying to master reading and writing.
Not exactly. But see below for more.
This.
One additional point: the modern scanners do check that the signature line isn’t blank. But they aren’t doing anything even remotely like verifying the signature matches anything on file. Try signing one by neatly writing “Cow Moon” in your best 4th grade penmanship. It’ll go through just fine.
It’s possible he just had trouble reading out loud. My middle school and high school classmate was really bad at reading text out loud, but he’s a bright guy.