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Signing Your X On The Line

One of the things that is easy to forget, especially when one is fond of literature, is that literacy is first required before one can enjoy it.

It’s an unhappy fact that illiteracy is still such a huge issue globally; that illiteracy rates exist at all in countries that can afford otherwise (I’m not going to pretend that education is not expensive — it is, regardless of who is footing the bill), it is appalling.

In the United States, if a person is unable to write — which does not necessarily mean they cannot read but the correlation exists in high percentages — but is eligible to vote (based on age and citizenship), that person can sign an X in lieu of their name on their ballot return. The signed X must be witnessed (see example above) and the witness’s signature becomes a guarantor. So luckily (kind of? I can’t really fathom that being unable to read or write would be lucky) there is some level of protection in place for “uneducated” people to be able to vote in my home country.

But what about accessing information?

And vetting information?

The former requiring systemic literacy (knowledge of systems) and the latter requiring media literacy (understanding source reliability, being aware of data and statistic falsities, and comprehending what fact-checking means). Content area literacy is required to make any kind of informed decision, and ‘content’ is not just academic; it is cultural, religious, sociological, economic, legal, business-focused, theoretic, linguistic, and social.

Impact

I work with adults who have low levels of literacy and with children who are developing literacy skills (or not, as the case may be — why learn to read when you can just watch or listen to information via zombie-fying devices?), and the statistics highlighted at the beginning of this article ring true to me:

• 79% of U.S. adults are literate (which means 21% are NOT)
• 54% of adults in the U.S. have a literacy rating below 6th grade level (age 12)

And if, by ‘literate’, these percentages are referring to BASIC literacy — Level 1 Literacy — it basically means that they can find the answer synonymous to the vocabulary requested in a question about a basic topic in a paragraph that uses low-level vocabulary.

Literacy in children is a whole ‘nother can of worms. It has to do with alphabetic awareness, phonological knowledge, vocabulary, cloze skills, ability to use age-level words appropriately, sentence and paragraph construction (and de-construction), and the successful application of ideas. I’ve seen varying statistics and they are not the simple kind; the most basic (and SAD) consistency I’ve found for literacy rates among U.S. children is that across the nation, kids are NOT reading at grade level.

Not Blaming, Not Complaining ~ Just Stating

I would love to say that I have an answer for all this. I don’t.

Blame can be placed in any number of directions on a multitude of responsible parties, but I don’t blame anyone. I don’t find that helpful.

All I can say is that literacy is important. Reading matters. Being able to write — down to the most basic writing exercise of signing your own name instead of an X on the line — makes a difference.

And if you are an educational warrior — if you are fighting to teach people of any age literacy on any level (in ANY language! please don’t think this is just about English!), despite the poison-tipped arrows of negativity the world aims your way — I raise my own shield to you.

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Letter X

My A-to-Z Blogging Challenge posts this April are centered around the topic of READING.

To read additional posts from this series, see here.

For a look at what other participants are up to, click on the badge above.