NAAL response
Greetings,
As I was reading the article “A First Look at the Literacy of America’s Adults in the 21st Century,” I stopped at one of the charts and took a closer look. It was Table 7: Average prose, document and quantitative literacy scores of adults, by educational attainment: 1992 and 2003. I was very much surprised to find that in all but three categories, the average score went down. All but two of the prose scores went down by a ‘significant’ difference. Less than half of the document scores were down by ‘significant’, and all of the quantitative scores were within the ‘significant difference’ category.
Does this mean that we, as Americans, are becoming less educated? Does this mean that our schools are failing? Although I cannot claim to know the answer, I can offer my reasoning. First off, I must point out that this is a work based on two studies, and only two studies. It is entirely possible that it is just a statistical anomaly rather than ‘hard evidence’. I would suggest that further studies would be necessary in order to reach a serious conclusion over the significant loss of quality in the school systems. However, I don’t think that Americans are becoming more stupid, since genetics will not change that much over the course of 11 years. The quality of our educational system can, however. The fact that the literacy scores have gone down and yet the level of educational attainment (Table 6) has generally gone up, does suggest that the quality of the educational system has decreased. On the other hand, it could also suggest a shift away from the necessity of literacy, as defined in the study, in order to succeed. For example, the vast repository of information that the internet is could provide students with the ability to use less in the way of this literacy. I know that my own abilities to research topics in the classical manner have been severely retarded by the availability of internet search engines such as proquest and google scholar, which would decrease my overall literacy scores, but doesn’t mean that I am less educated than my predecessor who would spend hours in the library searching for the proper book through the card index.
Overall, I don’t think that people are becoming less intelligent, they are not as classically trained as the tests would hope that they would be. In my opinion, the overall goal of education is not to teach facts to the masses, but rather to give them the skills to find the information they need, and how to understand and interpret the information.
Readings:
A First Look at the Literacy of America’s Adults in the 21st Century. http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF
