Mass Assault

One out of ten adult Americans sees most printed words as mere squiggly lines, and is, to U.S. census takers, a "functional illiterate." One such is Nara High, 64. of Durham, N.C. Instead of going to school, she went to work at eight in a textile mill, now lives alone in retirement, mostly watching television. "Oh, I would love to write my name," says she. "It would mean so much."

This week Nara High's precious TV set becomes more than a soporific as she and 53 other Durham illiterates prepare for an exciting venture. At 6 a.m., four days a week, they will turn on their TV sets for a 30-minute lesson. The aim: to give them a fourth-grade education in reading and writing by midsummer.

So begins the nation's first mass TV assault on illiteracy, broadcast by eleven commercial and three educational TV stations covering Alabama, both Carolinas and one-third of Tennessee. Illiterates in the area (adult population: 5,135,000) include 1,160,000 people with less than five years of schooling and 214,000 who never went to school at all. (No cause for complacency in supposedly better-educated areas: California has 440,000 illiterates, New York 900,000.)

B for Bird. Curriculum is the famed phonetic reading system invented by 75-year-old Dr. Frank C. Laubach. As a Congregationalist missionary in the Philippines 30 years ago, Laubach designed picture-word-syllable charts of the Maranaw language, launched an "Each-One-Teach-One" campaign among Moro tribesmen that made them 90% literate in a few months. The system is simple: an English student begins with consonants, learns that b sounds like buh-for-bird and sees the letter imposed on a picture of a bird. Much see-and-say repetition is followed by c imposed on a cup, d on a dish, f on a fish. Then come vowels, easy stories and eventually writing in script.

Laubach has tackled 260 languages and dialects in 97 countries, founded a worldwide literacy drive whose current momentum comes from the first TV use of his system four years ago by WKNO-TV in Memphis. Results were so impressive (2,000 illiterates learned to read and write in four months) that the lessons have been adapted with UNESCO aid for TV use in India, Africa and the Middle East. P:for Courage. Dynamo behind this week's U.S. drive is bustling Mayes Behrman, 67, literacy director of the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, N.C., which teaches simple crafts to mountain people. Last year Behrman raised $16,000 to get WKNO's 98 lessons kinescoped, ran them over Charlotte's WBTV for 1,000 students. The 750 graduates, who proudly showed up for a televised commencement, deluged Behrman with thanks ("I have always hoped and prayed I could read the Bible." "I can tell whether it's my mail now, and I can read Christmas cards." "I never could read the recipes before. Now I can, and this is something, believe me"). Behrman promptly raised $20,000 for this year's four-state program, aims at 5,000 students.

Most will need considerable moral courage. An example is Durham Student Pauline Osborne, 37, married at 13 and now a widow with five children. It is no easy thing for her to be the family's one illiterate, and to have as tutor her 14-year-old daughter. Behrman's problem is getting such people to admit their illiteracy and sign up, but diplomacy is turning the trick. Behrman likes to tell of one Charlotte factory where he was able to sign up only three people last year with advertised slogans such as "Would you like to read?" When he changed the pitch to "Would you like to learn to improve your reading?", enrollment jumped to 15. The fudging hardly matters. A national scandal is getting the attention it deserves.

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