From 2000 to 2005, the number of illiterate Chinese adults jumped by 33
percent, from 87 million to 116 million, the state-run China Daily reported this month. The newspaper noted that even before the increase, China's illiterate population had accounted for 11.3 percent of the world's total.
I confess, I've never actually spent much time thinking about the literacy rate in China, but given the attention China has garnered in the economic spector, it scares me that there continues to be a downslide in progress among the rural peasants in a country poised to dominate world markets in more than one aspect. I agree with the Chinese Education Minister, while I wonder how much the education ministry is actually doing, with inflated reports of literacy, poor measurement techniques etc. He says, "Illiteracy is not only a matter of education but also has a great social impact."
I only discovered the great social impact when I became an adult literacy tutor several years ago (a volunteer position I've had to put on hiatus over the last while, unfortunately). One of my clients was a woman who had a high school diploma. She was not even functionally literate. She could not read a single word. The first meeting with a client was always to determine the client's goals for the courses. Her response physically pained me. She looked at me and said, "I want to read to my boys. I want to buy a house. I just want to be able to support my family."
She made it through high school and graduated with her mother (and, likely, several other adults) knowing she at least struggled to read. Her mom figured she would "grow out of it," - overwhelmed with being a single parent and trying to do it all, she let it slide.
My client worked three jobs - ironically, one was as a behavioral aide in an elementary school. Her boys, pre-teens, both read at grade level. She had neighbors help her boys with their homework, or, under the guise of improving their reading skills, would have her boys read things to her. She desparately longed to get out of Section 8 housing.
I worked with her for a year. After a lifetime of learning to get by without being able to read, one starts to substitute words for the groups of undecipherable letters on a page, a menu, a document, a sign. She had years of "learning" to unlearn. We worked on phonetics, word groupings, memorization. Slowly, she progressed. When I had to relinquish her to another tutor because I was moving, she was reading at a first-grade level.
Perhaps, what scared me the most about the article on China's literacy rate, was how large the problem is still in the U.S. It's not shockingly monumental, like China's, but given the fact that the United States is, in theory, one of the most advanced countries in the world - a place where dreams can be realized, it still scares me. Any percentage of illiteracy is too high. Especially among those who have a high school education. An education that is supposedly based on the fundamental skill of reading.
I cannot imagine going through life not having the ability to read. I cannot imagine what it was like to be my client, gliding silently through life praying for help, while at the same time praying no one would notice her inability to read even the simplest of words. I cannot imagine the peasant farmers in China being so disenchanted as to believe that education is a waste of time.
Movement forward in time is supposed to equal progress. If China, on the brink of global economic domination, is struggling with such a fundamental problem with such a huge portion of its population, where do we stand to be in 5, 10, 20 years as a global society? What does it say about a world so obsessed with the race to domination that we fail to ensure basic skills are among the arsenal available to each man, woman, child for whom we race?
Interesting food for thought.
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