Fun with Dick and Jane by William S. Gray

Experts' estimates of the extent of functional illiteracy among our adult population range from 25 to 50 percent. Some parents have gone so far as to sue public school systems for graduating their children without teaching them adequate literacy skills so that they can get jobs. In fact, among people who have had as much as 12 years of schooling, there is an ever-growing population of functional illiterates-people who cannot read training manuals, books, magazines, or product labels written above a fourth- or fifth-grade level. We have more educational research than we know what to do with. So we have teachers, we have schools, we have laws. We have a universal compulsory education system that costs taxpayers over $100 billion a year, created to guarantee that everyone in America learns to read and write. They are the experts and professionals, with college degrees and certification. Americans, however, are already paying an army of over 2 million teachers who supposedly are doing something about it.

Illiteracy has now joined unwed motherhood, herpes simplex, and budget deficits as one of the nation's insoluble problems that get periodic attention in the media with the usual call that something be done about it. He further observed: 'While the United States has the highest proportion of its young people in college of any major nation, it has not yet figured out how to teach tens of millions of its citizens to fill out a job application, balance a checkbook, read a newspaper or write a simple letter.' News & World Report, in his introduction to the magazine's cover story of May 17, 1982, on America's declining literacy. Illiteracy in this country is turning out to be a blight that won't go away.' So stated John H.

Fun with Dick and Jane by William S. Gray