SOME LESSONS FROM THE UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION
From the beginning, there was purpose behind forced schooling, purpose which had nothing to do with what parents, kids, or communities wanted. Instead, it was forged out of what a highly centralized corporate economy and system of finance bent on internationalizing itself was thought to need; that, and what a strong, centralized political State needed, too. School was looked upon from the first decade of the twentieth century as a branch of industry and a tool of governance. For a considerable time, probably provoked by a climate of official anger and contempt directed against immigrants in the greatest displacement of people known to history, social managers of schooling were remarkably candid about what they were doing. This candor can be heard clearly in a speech Woodrow Wilson made to businessmen before the First World War:
We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.
...At the start of WWII, millions of men showed up at registration offices to take low-level academic tests before being inducted. 3 The years of maximum mobilization were 1942 to 1944; the fighting force - both those inducted and those turned away - had been mostly schooled in the 1930s. Eighteen million men were tested; 17,280,000 of them were judged to have the minimum competence in reading required to be a soldier-a 96 percent literacy rate. Although this was a 2 percent fall-off from the 98 percent rate among voluntary military applicants ten years before, the dip was so small it didn't worry anybody.
WWII was over in 1945. Six years later another war began in Korea. Several million men were tested for military service, but this time 600,000 were rejected. Literacy in the draft pool had dropped to 81 percent even though all that was needed to classify a soldier as literate was fourth-grade reading proficiency. In the few short years from the beginning of WWII to Korea, a terrifying problem of adult illiteracy had appeared. The Korean War group received most of its schooling in the 1940s; it had more years in school with more professionally trained personnel and more scientifically selected textbooks than the WWII men, yet it could not read, write, count, speak, or think as well as the earlier, less-schooled contingent.
A third American war began in the mid-1960s, By its end in 1973, the number of men found non-inductible by reason of inability to read safety instructions, interpret road signs, decipher orders, and so on - the number found illiterate, in other words - had reached 27 percent of the total pool. Vietnam-era young men had been schooled in the 1950s and the 1960s-much better schooled than either of the two earlier groups-but the 4 percent illiteracy of 1941, which had transmuted into the 19 percent illiteracy of 1952, now had grown into the 27 percent illiteracy of 1970. Not only had the fraction of competent readers dropped to 73 percent, but a substantial chunk of even those were only barely adequate; they could not keep abreast of developments by reading a newspaper; they could not read for pleasure; they could not sustain a thought or an argument; they could not write well enough to manage their own affairs without assistance.
Consider how much more compelling this steady progression of intellectual blindness is when we track it through Army admissions tests rather than college admissions scores and standardized reading tests, which inflate apparent proficiency by frequently changing the way the tests are scored.
Looking back, abundant data exist from states like Connecticut and Massachusetts to show that by 1840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was between 93 and 100 percent wherever such a thing mattered. According to the Connecticut census of 1840, only one citizen out of every 579 was illiterate, and you probably don't want to know, not really, what people in those days con sidered literate; it's too embarrassing. Popular novels of the period give a clue: Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826, sold so well that a contemporary equivalent would have to move 10 million copies to match it. If you pick up an uncut version, you find your self in a dense thicket of philosophy, history, culture, manners, politics, geography, astute analysis of human motives and actions, all conveyed in data-rich periodic sentences so formidable that only a determined and well-educated reader can handle it nowadays. Yet in 1818, the US was a small-farm nation without colleges or universities to speak of. Could those sinple folk have had more complex minds than our own?
By 1940, the literacy figure for all states stood at 96 percent for whites, 80 percent for blacks. Notice for all the disadvantages blacks labored under, four of five were still literate. Six decades later, at the end of the twentieth century, the National Adult Literacy Survey and the National Assessment of Educational Progress say 40 percent blacks and 17 percent of whites can't read at all. Put another way, black illiteracy doubled, and white illiteracy quadrupled. Before you think of anything else in regard to these numbers, think of this: we spend three to four times as much real money on schooling as we did 60 years ago, but 60 years ago virtually everyone, black or white, could read. ...
