by Ellen Kudlicki

Created on: May 07, 2008

The classic definition of illiteracy is the inability use language to read, write, listen, and speak. By those terms, a great number of our national population are limited in their ability to clearly communicate. When you consider the additional state known as functional illiteracy, you include a vast number of people who have been deliberately separated from the traditional educational material. The end result is a society that is highly stratified and increasingly divided based on the mere ability to communicate.

The need to convey and record ideas is nothing new, but the concept of creating a standard of literacy outside the constraints of the patrician class is something very modern indeed. While historically, wide spread literacy is a fairly recent phenomenon, the goals of introducing literacy to a wider segment of the population went hand in hand with the increased complexity and mechanization of the world economy. As more machines for manufacturing and farming purposes were invented, less manual labor was required. This created a greater need for people with the ability to apply reasoning skills and written instructions to duplicate work and products in a standardized manner. The need for common ground resulted in standardized languages, as exemplified by the publishing and distribution of school books, texts and dictionaries offering common spellings. The idea during this historical period was not to recognize cultural differences, but instead to bring all education under the same homogeneous heading. The desire was for intellectual conformity and in order to achieve, the expectations were than an educated person demonstrated that knowledge by the wealth and quality of material they had read.

This was the cornerstone of education from the early nineteenth century to the 1950's. Children were expected to read, regardless of their limitations. Disabilities were unknown and those who could not cut it in a regular curriculum would move onto jobs and services where their physical strength, natural wisdom, or verbal cleverness were assets. It was a natural winnowing out of students who were non-academic into jobs that met their skill sets. It wasn't the world of education we know today, where every child is destined for college and every student is put on the path of a college prep program, no matter what their skills or personal desires. As a result of the softening of school curriculum to accommodate students with limited skills or limited ambition, schools

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