 |
There are many reasons why some adults do not learn to read
and write well. Some have specific difficulties, for example,
dyslexia; for others there are different, sometimes overlapping,
causes. These include unsatisfactory teaching at school, poor
health, having hearing or sight problems and missing large
chunks of school through moving around. Taking the first steps
back into learning as an adult can be extremely daunting;
people need encouragement to believe they can improve their
skills and can achieve second time around. Where there are
additional factors involved such as poor housing, debt, family
upheaval, personal problems such as addiction or criminal
behaviour, enlisting the support of community partners and
other professionals can make all the difference.
By Tom Sticht, International Consultant in Adult Education
Why is it so hard to get funding for adult literacy education?
Innumerable studies, reports, TV shows, and statistical surveys
in most of the industrialized nations of the world declare
that their nation is being brought to its economic knees because
of widespread low basic skills (literacy, numeracy) amongst
the adult population. But repeated calls for funding commensurate
with the size of the problem go unanswered. Why?
Beneath the popular pronouncements of educators, industry
leaders, and government officials about the importance of
adult basic skills development there flows an undercurrent
of disbelief about the abilities of illiterates or the poorly
literate to ever improve much above their present learning.
This was encountered close to a hundred years ago when Cora
Wilson Stewart started the Moonlight Schools of Kentucky in
1911. Her claim that adults could learn to read and write
met with skepticism. As she reported, "Some educators, however,
declared preposterous the claims we made that grown people
were learning to read and write. It was contrary to the principles
of psychology, they said."
Today that undercurrent of disbelief still flows, but it
carries with it the flotsam and jetsam of 'scientific facts'
from genetics science, brain science, and psychological science.
Look here at objects snatched from the undercurrent of disbelief
stretching back for just a decade and a half:
2006. Ann Coulter is a major
voice in the conservative political arena. In her new book,
Godless: The Church of Liberalism (Chapter 7, pages 172-174)
she clearly defends the ideas given in Murray & Hernstein's
book The Bell Curve regarding the genetic basis of intelligence.
By extension, since The Bell Curve uses reading and math tests
in the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT), Coulter is
discussing the genetic basis of literacy and numeracy. In
her book she says about The Bell Curve: "Contrary to the party
line denying that such a thing as IQ existed, the book methodically
demonstrated that IQ exists, it is easily measured, it is
heritable, and it is extremely important. Among many other
things, IQ is a better predictor than socioeconomic status
of poverty, unemployment, criminality, divorce, single motherhood,
workplace injuries, and high school dropout rates. Although
other factors influence IQ, such as a good environment and
nutrition, The Bell Curve authors estimated that IQ was about
40 to 80 per cent genetic."
Coulter goes on to discuss the misuse of science in the same
chapter in relation to AIDS and homosexuality, feminism, trial-lawyers
law suits, DDT and environmentalists, abortion and stem cell
research, and other topics that are controversial among large
segments of the population but of mainstream concern in the
far right conservative base in the United States.Because of
her position as a best-selling author and spokesperson for
conservative groups, Ann Coulter's ideas about the genetic
basis of intelligence and high school dropouts can have a
profound impact upon political thinking about basic skills
education among adults who have not achieved well.
2005. The Nobel Prize winning
economist, James J. Heckman, in an interview at the Federal
Reserve Bank region in Chicago discussed his ideas about cognitive
skills and their malleability in later life with members of
a presidential commission consisting of former U.S. senators,
heads of federal agencies, tax attorneys and academic economists.
Later in his interview he discusses what Adam Smith, in his
The Wealth of Nations said and why he, Heckman, disagrees
with Smith.
According to Heckman, Adam Smith said, ". people are basically
born the same and at age eight one can't really see much difference
among them. But then starting at age 8, 9, 10, they pursue
different fields, they specialize and they diverge. In his
mind, the butcher and the lawyer and the journalist and the
professor and the mechanic, all are basically the same person
at age eight."
Heckman disagrees with this and says: "This is wrong. IQ
is basically formed by age eight, and there are huge differences
in IQ among people. Smith was right that people specialize
after eight, but they started specializing before eight. On
the early formation of human skill, I think Smith was wrong,
although he was right about many other things. I think these
observations on human skill formation are exactly why the
job training programs aren't working in the United States
and why many remediation programs directed toward disadvantaged
young adults are so ineffective. And that's why the distinction
between cognitive and noncognitive skill is so important,
because a lot of the problem with children from disadvantaged
homes is their values, attitudes and motivations. Cognitive
skills such as IQ can't really be changed much after ages
eight to 10. But with noncognitive skills there's much more
malleability. That's the point I was making earlier when talking
about the prefrontal cortex. It remains fluid and adaptable
until the early 20s. That's why adolescent mentoring programs
are as effective as they are. Take a 13-year-old, you're not
going to raise the IQ of a 13-year-old, but you can talk the
13-year-old out of dropping out of school. Up to a point you
can provide surrogate parenting."
Here Heckman seems to think of the IQ as something relatively
fixed at an early age and not likely to be changed later in
life. But if IQ is measured in The Bell Curve, a book in which
Heckman found some merit, using the AFQT, which in turn is
a literacy and numeracy test, then this would imply that Heckman
thinks the latter may not be very malleable in later life.
This seems consistent with his belief that remediation programs
for adults are ineffective and do not make very wise investments.
2000. It is easy to slip from
talking about adults with low literacy ability to talking
about adults with low intelligence. On October 2, 2000, Dan
Seligman, columnist at Forbes magazine, wrote about the findings
of the National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) of 1993 and said,"But
note that what's being measured here is not what you've been
thinking all your life as 'literacy'. The cluster of abilities
being examined is obviously a proxy for plain old 'intelligence'."
He then goes on to argue that government programs won't do
much about this problem of low intelligence, and, by extension,
of low literacy.
These types of popular press articles can stymie funding
for adult literacy education. That is one reason why it is
critical that when national assessments of cognitive skills,
including literacy, are administered, we need to be certain
about just what it is we are measuring. Unfortunately, that
is not the case with the 1993 NALS or the more recent 2003
National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL). These assessments
leave open the possibility of being called 'intelligence'
tests leading some, like Seligman, to the general conclusion
that the less literate are simply the less intelligent and
society might as well cast them off, their 'intelligence genes'
will not permit them to ever reach level 3 or any other levels
at the high end of cognitive tests.
1998. Dr. G. Reid Lyon of the
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development provided
an Overview of Reading and Literacy Initiatives to the U.
S. Congress Committee on Labor and Human Resources on April
28, 1998. In his testimony he stated that in learning to read
it is important for children to possess good abilities in
phonemic analysis. He stated: "Difficulties in developing
phoneme awareness can have genetic and neurobiological origins
or can be attributable to a lack of exposure to language patterns
and usage during the preschool years.. It is for this reason
that the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
(NICHD) within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) considers
reading failure to reflect not only an educational problem,
but a significant public health problem as well. Within this
context, a large research network consisting of 41 research
sites in North America, Europe, and Asia are working hard
to identify:
1) the critical environmental, experiential, cognitive, genetic,
neurobiological, and instructional conditions that foster
strong reading development;
2) the risk factors that predispose youngsters to reading
failure; and
3) the instructional procedures that can be applied to ameliorate
reading deficits at the earliest possible time."
Discussing why some children may have difficulties learning
to read, Lyon went on to say: "Children raised in poverty,
youngsters with limited proficiency in English, children with
speech and hearing impairments, and children from homes where
the parent's reading levels are low are relatively predisposed
to reading failure. Likewise, youngsters with sub-average
intellectual capabilities have difficulties learning to read,
particularly in the reading comprehension domain."
Taken together, these statements by a senior government
scientist advisor to both the President and the Congress of
the United States indicates that the NICHD considers that
in some cases low literacy may result from genetic, neurological,
sub-average intellectual capability or a combination of these
and other factors. Again, this may contribute to wide-spread
beliefs that adults with low literacy may possess faulty genes,
brains, and/or intellectual abilities and are unlikely to
benefit from adult literacy education programs. From a policy
perspective, then, policymakers may think that funding such
programs may be regarded as a poor use of public funds.
1997. In a January 7, 1997
article in the Washington Times , a prominent newspaper published
in Washington DC and read by many members of Congress, columnist
Ken Adelman wrote: "The age-old nature vs. nurture debate
assumes immediacy as the new Congress and new administration
gin up to address such issues as poverty, crime, drugs, etc.
This, the most intellectually intriguing debate around, is
moving far toward nature (and far from nurture) with new evidence
presented by an odd pair, gay activist Chandler Burr and conservative
scholar Charles Murray. In brief, their new findings show
that 1) homosexuality and 2) educational-economic achievement
are each largely a matter of genes - not of upbringing. If
true, as appears so, the scope of effective government programs
narrows. Fate, working through chromosomes, bestows both sexual
orientation and brainpower, which shape one's life and success.
Little can be altered, besides fostering tolerance and helping
in any narrow window left open, through even an ideally designed
public program." (page B-6)
The juxtaposition of homosexuals and those of lower educational
and economic achievement is an obvious rhetorical device meant
to stir negative emotions about both groups. This is a rhetorical
device brought back into play by Coulter in her 2006 book
cited above.
1991. One of the beliefs in
our culture is that the brain and its intellectual capacity
is developed in early childhood. There is a widespread belief
that if children's early childhood development is not properly
stimulated, then there is likely to be intellectual underdevelopment
leading to academic failures, low aptitude, and social problems
such as criminal activity, teenage pregnancy and welfare.
It will be difficult if not impossible to overcome the disadvantages
of deficiencies in early childhood stimulation later in adulthood.
So why invest much in adult education? We need instead to
put billions of dollars into early childhood education.
That these beliefs about the consequence of early childhood
development are widespread is revealed by articles written
by prominent journalists in major newspapers. For instance,
on Sunday, October 13, 1991 the San Diego Union newspaper
reprinted an article by Joan Beck, a columnist for the Chicago
Tribune, that argued for early childhood education because,
"Half of adult intellectual capacity is already present by
age four and 80 percent by age eight, ... the opportunity
to influence [a child's] basic intelligence - considered to
be a stable characteristic by age 17 - is greatest in early
life."
A year earlier in the same newspaper on October 14, 1990
an adult family literacy educator was quoted as saying, "Between
the ages of zero to four we have learned half of everything
we'll ever learn in our lives. Most of that has to do with
language, imagination, and inquisitiveness." This doesn't
hold out much hope for the adults in family literacy programs.
Joan Beck was quoting research by Benjamin Bloom in the 1960s.
But Bloom did not show that half of one's intellect was achieved
by age four. Rather, he argued that IQ at age four was correlated
+.70 with IQ at age 17. Since the square of .7 is .49, Bloom
stated that half of the variance among a group of adults'
IQ scores at age 17 could be predicted from their group of
scores at age four. But half of the variability among a group
of people's IQ scores is a long way from the idea that half
of a given person's IQ is developed by age four. This is not
even conceptually possible because for one thing there is
no universally agreed to understanding of what 'intelligence'
is. Further, even if we could agree on what 'intelligence'
is, there is no such thing as 'half of one's intellect' because
no one knows what 0 or 100 per cent intelligence is. Without
knowing the beginning and end of something we can't know when
we have half of it.
1990. A report by the Department
of Defense shows how these beliefs about the possibility of
doing much for adults can affect government policy. After
studying the job performance and post-service lives of 'lower
aptitude', less-literate personnel, the report claimed that
they had been failures both in and out of the military. Then,
on February 24, 1990, the Director of Accession Policy of
the Department of Defense commented in the Washington Post
newspaper, "The lesson is that low-aptitude people, whether
in the military or not, are always going to be at a disadvantage.
That's a sad conclusion." A similar report of the Department
of Defense study was carried in the New York Times of March
12, 1990. Then on April 8, 1990 Jack Anderson's column in
the Washington Post quoted one of the Department of Defense
researchers saying, "...by the age of 18 or 19, it's too late.
The school system in early childhood is the only place to
really help, and that involves heavy participation by the
parents."
Regarding the news articles about the Department of Defense
studies of 'low aptitude' troops, the conclusions were based
on analyses of the job performance of hundreds of thousands
of personnel in both the 1960s and 1980s with Armed Forces
Qualification Test (AFQT) scores between the 10th and the
30th percentiles, the range of scores which the Department
of Defense studies called 'low aptitude'.
But contrary to what the Department of Defense researchers
and accession policy maker stated, the actual data show that
in both time periods, while the low aptitude personnel did
not perform quite as well as those personnel with aptitudes
above the 30th percentile, over 80 per cent of the low aptitude
personnel did, in fact, perform satisfactorily and many performed
in an outstanding manner. As veterans they had employment
rates and earnings far exceeding their rates and earnings
at the beginning of the study. Further investigation by the
media would have revealed these discrepancies between what
the Department of Defense's researchers said and what the
actual findings were. But as it stands, these popular media
types of stories reinforce the stereotypes about adults with
who score low on intelligence or aptitude tests and perform
poorly on tests of the basic skills of literacy and numeracy.
We can find these pieces of scientific debris all the way
back to the Moonlight Schools of 1911. Following her account
of those educators and academics who declared that teaching
grown people to read and write was contrary to the principles
of psychology, Cora Wilson Stewart said, "While they went
around saying it couldn't be done, we went on doing it. We
asked the doubters this question, "When a fact disputes a
theory, is it not time to discard the theory?" There was no
reply." Today when we ask why the funding for adult literacy
education is so little so late, there is still no reply. So
we just keep on teaching adults to read and write. And we
do it on the cheap, even though it is theoretically impossible.
(12 June 2006)
| |
80px.gif)
