MEMBER BLOG TAG: literacy
| Monday, January 30, 2012 2:15PM | | | | Writers, Illiteracy, and Ed Reform | Tags: literacy, reading, phonics, alphabet, sight words, dolch words, whole word, whole language, high-frequency words, meaning, comprehension, sophistry
| | | | Actual title wouldn't fit: What Writers Should Know About Illiteracy
If you Google “right to read” and similar phrases, you will be taken willy-nilly to two very different types of concerns.
The common concern is censorship, copyright law, and assistive technologies. The problem here is that people don’t have ACCESS to books.
My concern, much less common, is summed up in one word: ILLITERACY. Tens of millions of Americans have not been taught to read properly. They have access to books but so what? They can’t read them.
Illiteracy is a far bigger (and more intellectually interesting) problem than most educated people assume. The US is said to have 50,000,000 functional illiterates. (More than 1,000,000 are in jail.) This is a stupid waste and, I’d say, a crime.
I’ve... | | | | | |
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