Illiteracy: A Pipeline to Prison
How To Keep Your Children Out of Jail
There is a 67% chance your child will end up in jail or on welfare if he or she is not reading proficiently by the 4th grade. That’s according to literacy statistics provided at begintoread.com.
Studies conducted by the U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, support this statistic, citing 70% of adult inmates and 85% of all juvenile offenders are functionally illiterate.
This means most inmates, both adult and juvenile, cannot use “printed and written information to function in society, to achieve [their] goals, and to develop [their] knowledge and potential.”
Now, before passing judgment on these poor souls, consider that in 1985, 50% of all American adults were unable to read an eighth grade level book. Yeah, but that was so 1985, you say.
Well, the more recent studies conducted by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy show that in 2003 improvement was virtual immeasurable. Literacy among adults only improved by 8 points from the 1992 study.
Get this: in 2003, thirty-two million adults in the U.S. could not read at all.
In 2003, that was 14% of the population. Further, only 13% were at or above Proficient. That means about the same number of people who can’t read at all “possess the skills necessary to perform complex and challenging literacy activities.”
The studies cited scored respondents in three areas: prose, documentation, and quantitative. Here’s what that means in the words of the NCES:
Prose literacy is the knowledge and skills needed to perform prose tasks (i.e., to search, comprehend, and use information from continuous texts, such as paragraphs from stories); document literacy is the knowledge and skills needed to perform document tasks (i.e., to search, comprehend, and use information from noncontinuous texts in various formats, such as bills or prescription labels); and quantitative literacy is the knowledge and skills required to perform quantitative tasks (i.e., to identify and perform computations, either alone or sequentially, using numbers embedded in printed materials).
In other words, of the approximately 320 million Americans living in the United States at that time, a little more than 245 million of them were adults. Of those 245 million adults, nearly 34 million of them couldn’t read this blog post.
Additionally, the statistics show 123 million adults can read a blog post without too much trouble, but only 32 million of them can conceptualize the information and make meaningful use of the content.
To put this another way, if there were 100 people in a room reading an eighth-grade-level book, 14 of them could not read it, 50 of them could read it without too much trouble, but of those 50 only 13 would understand what they read in a comprehensive way.
But, what about today? Surely literacy rates have improved, right? Somewhat; but once again, not by much. According to the National Literacy Institute:
On average, 79% of U.S. adults nationwide are literate in 2024.
21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024.
54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level
20% are below 5th-grade level.
Ability Is Not Enough
So far, I’ve only been throwing around statistics that speak to our nation’s ability to read. It’s one thing to recognize and discuss the implications of ability, but it’s another thing altogether to consider the implications of the content read by those who have the ability.
For example, let’s think of the ability to read in the context of one’s ability to drive a car, whereas the content of reading is akin to where you drive it. Having the ability to drive is essential, but where you drive is why you got your license in the first place.
Understanding this important distinction takes the conversation to an entirely new level.
Growing up in the boonies, I learned to drive well before it was legal for a twelve-year-old to take to the streets in a two-thousand-pound automobile. I had three and half years of practicing my driving ability while I anticipated all the unfamiliar and fascinating places I would go and see whenever I got my license.
I had vain imaginations of a slick set of wheels cruising the drag in curious towns with windows rolled down, elbow on the window seal, wrist cradled at 12 o’clock on the steering wheel, Lynard Skynard turned way up, and the wind flitting through my mullet (Yeah, it was the 80s).
I would know freedom like the birds, flying high in the sky, as far as my wings could carry me, anywhere at anytime, man.
Turns out my wings couldn’t fly me too far. No slick wheels; no curious towns.
I discovered very quickly a teen-aged kid with a car and a driver’s license was equivalent to a courier service on retainer. Constrained by the length of my wallet and my parents' good sense, I fluttered hither and yon for bread and milk and other household items we sometimes needed.
Reading can be much the same—what we imagine it should be like, and what it’s really like.
If your reading only consists of the instruction manual to the new device you just purchased, or the 30-page business contract your boss flopped on your desk yesterday, or even some twaddle you take on vacation to the beach this summer, you’re going to find reading the same way my teen-aged self found having my driver’s license—an anticlimactic bore.
What Dead People Can Teach Us About Reading
A dead Congregationalist theologian named Lyman Abbot believed books can render three services: they can be ornaments; they can be tools; and they can be friends.
I would posit most Americans view books as ornaments. Like the millionaire who built a new home and stocked the library shelves with books beautifully bound, but “cut in half so they'll go further,” they try to foster an image of literary prowess by decorating their homes with beautiful unread books.
It's all smoke and mirrors for these folks.
Others collect books and read them the same way a mechanic accumulates Snap-on tools. Since tools are necessary, one can never have too many, it's reasoned; and if you can afford it, you might as well buy the best.
It's strictly functional for these folks. Sure it's certainly more beneficial to have tools than ornaments, but tools tend to go in drawers or boxes until they're needed.
Finally, there are those of us who view books as friends (or in some cases, knowledgeable acquaintances with whom we dialogue, humbly and cautiously).
For us, books are read and re-read frequently, slowly, and carefully. We listen with an ear to hear and dialogue with the author hoping to glean some forgotten or overlooked insight into this complex world we live in.
Abbot asserted:
Books contain the thoughts and dreams of men, their hopes and strivings, and all their immortal parts. It’s in books that most of us learn how splendidly worth while life is. Books are the immortality of the race, the father and mother of most that is worth while cherishing in our hearts.
A Unitarian clergyman, William E. Channing, wrote,
God be thanked for books! They are the voice of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. They give to all who will faithfully use them.
What these men are referring to is what G. K. Chesterton called, “The democracy of the dead,” and what Mortimer Adler called “the great conversation.”
Learning to read well, and more importantly, learning to read well the great books that shaped the Western world offer the reader a door out of the cave of images. It opens windows from past worlds and allows the light of their discovery to shine on present and future circumstances, a sort of literary necromancy, but redeemed and holy.
Conversing with dead (and the living) in this manner provides insights about the perennial ideas, beliefs, and themes of various cultures who have shared in the human experience.
It frees the reader from his chains of ignorance, liberates his mind from the bondage of shadows, and provides his imagination with categories of thought for understanding more perfectly the mythos of Jesus Christ—the incarnation, death, and resurrection of the Word of God.
It’s not surprising that reading well, and in particular, reading great books well have been a significant part of a liberal arts education—from Latin libere meaning to liberate (i.e., the education of a free man).
So if you want to keep your children out of jail, teach them to read; and if you want to keep them from being enslaved, teach them to read the great books!
Sources
Abbot, Lyman. The Guide to Reading. The Gutenberg Project. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7167
Begin to Read. http://www.begintoread.com/research/literacystatistics.html
Kozol, Jonathan. Illiterate America.
National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES). http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=69
National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL). https://nces.ed.gov/naal/