Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 22, 1990 TAG: 9006220769
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-13 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAXTON DAVIS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Harwood, though not above being respectable now and then, decided a couple of weeks ago to show his readers how close at hand is the illiteracy in which we are all sinking.
When a sheaf of letters reached him from seniors about to graduate from Buena Vista's Parry McCluer High School, he ran them as they came, misspellings and all.
No editor of any newspaper I have ever worked on - by now a considerable number - has not dreamed of doing the same thing. Letters from the irate, and occasionally even the happy, come in frequently bearing the most infamous stigmata of illiteracy. Now and then the goofs are allowed through, perhaps as a subtle revelation of the quality of the mind that conceived them. More often, with a wary sigh that he wished the public had to read what he did, the editor applies the pencil and makes the writer look better than in fact he is.
No doubt Harwood has done that before, and no doubt he will do so again. But this time, appalled at what he read, he determined to let Buena Vista's citizens see what their educational system was letting pass. The students' blunders, said Harwood, "make a sad point about the state of education."
Indeed they do. "Their" came out "there," "shaping" came out "shapeing," "writing" came out "writting," and grammatical errors abounded. And these came from graduating seniors, no less.
Did respectable Buena Vista thank Harwood for his service? Indeed it did not, and, in the finest tradition of shooting the messenger, promptly cried "Foul." The Parry McCluer principal, whose head should have been hanging in shame at what his teachers have failed to do, said Harwood was being unkind. The teacher whose project the letters were said so too. So did letter writers to Harwood's paper, who chided him for sometimes making spelling errors himself.
Well, they're wrong. It was cold-water therapy, to be sure, and won't work as long as principals, teachers and parents think it's worse to tell the truth than to live a lie. Nor, in spades, is Buena Vista unique.
Every test of student literacy shows that Americans of all classes and all locales are falling annually into deeper illiteracy - and not only into illiteracy itself but into related manifestations of ignorance. When, as a recent survey showed, half of recent high-school graduates cannot locate their own country on a map, let alone their own state or hometown, we are in big trouble.
Biomedical researchers tell us we are already behind, and falling steadily further behind, in training the personnel needed to conduct the sort of medical research now required to find adequate therapies for AIDS. Competent personnel in the high-tech work now necessary in the computer industries are rare. Today's public-school teachers are only too often as near illiteracy as the student whom they are supposed to liberate from it. And if all areas of knowledge require better general education, so does the simple day-to-day living everyone faces. All of it begins with learning to read and write.
Just last week, for example, even as Harwood was taking flak in Buena Vista, my mail brought these lulus:
The Christian Science Monitor, as sidebar to a story on the oil spill off Texas, ran a meticulous map pointing, as it said, to "the sight of tanker fire."
Preservation News, the newspaper of The National Trust, ran a handsome advertisement for a house in Hot Springs "in the manor of Stanford White."
And these are the media of the presumably already literate.
by CNB