Literacy and Literacy Training Affects Us ALL
Gary Lear posts an excellent message on the issue of literacy and literacy training which we unfortunately can’t reproduce in its entirety, but here’s my commentary.:
> I also want to thank you and Gail for doing such a superb job of
> demonstrating for me what I was trying to explain to Bill earlier about
> why this issue is so hard to deal with and why we’ve made very little
> progress over the past decade or so. It is quite typical to have a
> group of people who have no idea what they are talking about go around
> quoting other people who have no idea what they are talking about,
> making up things as they go, using their own definitions for terms,
Just a comment on the latter. It’s struck me Gary, that you are usingdefinitions that are from a particular perspective, while Gail and Don areusing definitions (particularly Don) that are more lay person. It’s like
the difference between the man or woman in the street talking about intelligence, and a psychometrist talking about intelligence.
It’s hard for a layperson and a psychometrist to discuss meaningfully when neither makes the effort to see the merit in the other’s perspective.
In this discussion, it’s interesting that I find the omission of writing from the definition of literacy to be quite counter-intuitive. Perhaps there’s a rational reasons for this to be the case, but my “lay” perception is that I don’t quite understand it.
But also keep in mind that those with the
> lowest literacy skills tend to hold less skilled jobs and live in a
> lower socio-economic level than most of the participants on this list.
Just an observation and that is that even for those with lowest literacy skills in less skilled jobs, their performance can be impacted and limited. I recall talking to a director of physical plant, and it was interesting that he felt there were real issues regarding the ability of some staff to properly handle the differentcleansers and formulas and to apply the correct one to the correctproblem. Because, simply, they didn’t always have the skills to read the directions, and this was particularly the case when something “changes”.
Literacy played a huge part in the project, as they
> realized that before you can develop higher tech skills you need to have
> the basic skills in place.
An addition - anything that limits the earning power of a populationsegment does not only affect that segment, but if the segment is largeenough, the whole economy is affected through a wide range of issues fromlimited tax base, increased taxes, etc.
That is a major reason why literacy is a NATIONAL issue.