The New Illiterates

U.S. citizens last week engaged in a lively debate over the extent of the nation's illiteracy. Bogging down in a mire of statistics, the debate proved mainly that most Americans can read & write better than they can figure.

President Roosevelt started it by announcing what he considered shocking news: that 433,000 Class 1-A draft registrants had flunked the Army's literacy test (TIME, June 8). Nodding gravely, Columbia University's Professor Emeritus William C. Bagley, editor of School and Society, pronounced the figures "deplorable and discouraging." But the New York Times's silver-lined Columnist Simeon Strunsky observed that it was not as bad as all that: the Army had simply stiffened the literacy test, on the theory that "what is good enough for peacetime intelligence is not good enough for the Army."

A few days later the Census Bureau issued a reassuring report: 86.5% of U.S. adults have at least a fourth-grade education; more than half finished grammar school; almost a quarter graduated from high school; 4.6% are college graduates. People were still confused.

The reason for their confusion was easily explained: between the 1930 and 1940 Censuses the nation had changed its definition of illiteracy. In 1930, the Census listed as "illiterates" those who could not read or write (4.3% of the population); in 1940 it dropped the reading & writing questions as no longer significant. Now educators class as illiterate adults who failed to finish the fifth grade (13.5%). The Army uses the same yardstick.

By World War I standards, U.S. illiteracy is far from alarming: in 1917-18 the Army flunked 25% because they could not read or write at all.

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