[NLA] Government Misinformation-summing Up (long, please bare with me)

[AndresMuro@aol.com]

In a message dated 11/16/2002 7:08:26 AM Mountain Standard Time, 
tsticht at znet.com writes:

> More than 40 percent of working-age adults in the United States
> lack the skills and education needed to succeed in family, work, and
> community life today (according to the NALS).

I like to switch the tone of the discussion for a second and explore the 
quote above. I believe that this was discussed before, but I would like to 
dwell on this a little. This quote has generated much discussion about 
methodology, however, there has not been a discussion about the implications 
of this quote. 

My questions is, does this quote mean that these adults do not have the 
ability to succeed in all the activities today, but they could have succeed 
yesterday? If so, what makes the success a temporal thing rather than an 
educational thing. 

I believe that Tom's original intention was to make people aware of this 
issue that has gone largely ignored. 

My interpretation of this comes from my own intuition and from having read 
some references to this (some by Tom), however, my analysis isn't the product 
of extensive scientific research or any valid methodology. 

Aside from the NALS, the variable that has lead people to make the claim of 
literacy insufficiency is economics. I will use El Paso as an example, but 
this applies largely to the rest of the USA.

In the fifties and sixties, garment industry was flourishing in the US and 
was housed in El Paso because of its proximity with Mexico. Many women with 
low literacy skills were brought to work in the garment industry starting at 
minimum wage. Many of these women worked for years in the factories rasing 
families, purchasing homes, becoming part of the local economy, and becoming 
some of the biggest contributors to the growth of our community. Many of 
their children and grand children went to college and are now professionals 
working throughout the USA and raising their own families. 

If any of these women were given the NALS, they would have probably scored 
very low. Are we to assume that they lacked the skills to succeed then, or 
are we to make that claim only today? 

What factor made them successful then, but not today?? Globalization. As jobs 
have moved out of the US, unemployment has followed. As manual labor is 
leaving the US people cannot participate in the economy any more. As a 
result, the go into poverty and all aspects of their lives are affected. 

Interestingly, on their way oversees, many manufacturing jobs move through El 
Paso. In El Paso, employers claim that they can only hire English speakers 
with HS diplomas to do basic assembly, etc. These companies are on their way 
to Mexico, Central America, Asia. Do you all think that as soon as they get 
there, they will employ English speakers with High school degrees? Of course 
not, they will hire illiterate adults and children to do the same jobs that 
English Speakers with HS degrees do in the USA. 

On another note, what does it mean to be literate? A woman, mother of four, 
with a fourth grade education may walk into a supermarket, purchase all the 
groceries to make a healthy meal for a family of 6, return home, and within a 
couple of hours have a full meal prepared. A male professional with a Ph. D. 
may not be able to perform the same task. In this sense, literacy is a 
cultural thing that has to do with the ability to read an environment. 
However, the NALS would clearly show that the Ph. D has literacy skills and 
the woman does not.

I grew up in Buenos Aires a very dense city. If anything broke there, from a 
car lightbulb to some appliance, you would call the repairman next door who 
would fix it at very low cost. In the USA small household repairs and auto 
repairs are performed by people who buy parts at large chain stores. they do 
not call repairmen to do these chores. My spouse gets highly irritated and 
calls me all kinds of names when I don't know how to fix a toilette leak, or 
how to prime a carburetor. In El Paso, it is expected that all males can do 
this. I was largely illiterate at this tasks, and nowadays, I can perform a 
few of them. Barbara Something, author of Nickled and Dimed, explained that 
for all her education she didn't have any more skills at performing the jobs 
that poor women were performing for peanuts, and it took a lot of effort for 
her to learn to do them. In fact, after months of trying to live as a poor 
person she didn't have the skills to survive, even though she didn't have 
kids, she had a car and she could cheat here and there to survive. In her 
book, she couldn't explain how people survive if they are really poor. She 
could only show that it was an amazing task that required incredible skills.  
  

One of the things that the NALS does not measure is orality as a way to read 
and understand an environment and successfully operate in it. So, it may not 
be an effective tool to measure the ability of someone to succeed in a 
certain context. 

The reason I bring orality is because I believe that we still live in a very 
oral society. At the same time, because of the need to disseminate 
information as quickly as possible, and because of the evolution of 
technology, the media and the economy are forcing an oral society to make a 
quick transition into a highly literate world. A good example are the medical 
and health care fields. Information is disseminated purely through writing, 
while a few years ago, a lot of the information was explained orally. This 
has created tremendous gaps for people. However, written information reduces 
the operation costs and makes insurance companies happy. 

I think that the implications of all this are very important in understading 
what literacy is and how we measure it. Ultimately, form this perspective 
literacy is not a fixed thing, but something that is determined by power in 
context. If so, we may need to look at literacy, in terms of quality of life, 
and not strictly in terms of a fixed set of skills. We also need to explore 
the ways in which we can create a society with a higher quality of life.

If this is our aim, we may see that literacy is often used to put blame, ie: 
Those who suffer, suffer because they are iliterate. If they only became 
literate they would stop suffering. It is their responsibility to become 
literate and our job is to remediate them.   We ought to move away from this 
paradigm into a more humane one. From this perspective, I think that 
Daphnee's exploration of gay, lesbian issues dwell on quality of life from a 
cultural perspective rather than literacy as a fixed measurement of 
inadequacy. 

Andres


   

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