Illiteracy in the U.S.

The Bureau of the Census had a reassuring but not startling piece of news last week: since 1930, the number of U.S. illiterates (14 years old and up) has dropped 1.3 million, while the population has jumped 17.4 million. But school superintendents and Fourth of July orators could keep their shirt fronts buttoned: 2.8 million people in the U.S. still cannot read & write.

The bureau also told how its own methods of measuring literacy had changed. From 1870 to 1930, census takers simply asked whether a person could read & write. Too many illiterates, the bureau felt, were not admitting it. So, in 1940, the bureau asked people only how many years of school they had finished. (If you had completed five, you were "literate"; if not, you weren't.)

For the 1948 report (based on a sampling of 25,000 households), interviewers combined both questions. A literate person is still anybody who has completed the fifth grade--a definition that will make many sixth-grade teachers and some college professors wince. But an illiterate is now a person who i) has not finished five years of school, and 2) says that he cannot read & write.

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