Reading Mattheissen's Shadow Country , daily (not gaily) mopping the flooded basement: I've spent many recent hours mulling the higher ground.
Shadow Country reimagines the Ed Watson legend, but its foreground details the settlement of Florida's Ten Thousand Islands from post-Civil War though the frenzied and corrupt land development of the 1920's. For descendants of escaped slaves, white felons on the lam, survivors of the Seminole Wars, plume-hunters and assorted drifters, this higher ground of course was but relative, beset as they were by heat, hurricane, mosquito, water moccasin, alligator and briney poverty. Geographically the higher ground was even more mingy, consisting of those islands formed by Calusa shell middens. The largest such island was Chokoloskee, with a highest point of twenty feet above sea-level.
Higher ground, of course, is narcotic. Immediately one forgets the narrow dimensions of the foothold, the immense area and depth of the waters from which one escaped, the illusory nature of escape.
Every few months, my non-profit mind becomes a swirl of "why don't people." Why don't they read to their kids, obtain a library card, sign up to receive free books from my group? The solution is always to review this summary of the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy ("NAAL").
The U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics ("NCES") tested 19,000 adults (ages 16+) in three aspects of English literacy: quantitative, documentary and prose. NCES extrapolated those results to the 222 million such adults.
Two percent (4.4 million people) were eliminated from the findings, as foreign speakers who could not be tested. An additional three percent
(6.6 million) could recognize some letters, numbers or words; were alternatively assessed, and are included in the study's Below Basic category. Thus five percent of adults - 11 million people - are illiterate in English.
Descriptions of the assessment categories appear at page 16 of the linked summary. You will note that NCES refused to call the highest category "advanced," as unrepresentative of the skills. The highest category rather is "proficient." For prose, "proficient" equates to an ability to compare two dueling newspaper editorials.
Here are the prose literacy results. I cannot truncate the white space below, so scroll down for the chart. (No computer-literacy cracks!)
| LITERACY LEVEL | MILLIONS | PERCENT |
|---|---|---|
| Below Basic | 30 | 14 |
| Basic | 63 | 29 |
| Intermediate | 95 | 44 |
| Proficient | 28 | 13 |
Each category incorporates, of course, a range of scores. A better grasp on the skills gap can be gained by comparing Report Figures 3 and 9. Figure 3 illustrates what is termed a "moderately" difficult task: using a simple sandpaper selection guide. Figure 9 then reports the actual success for that task in each category. Of Below Basic scorers, only 8 percent could read the chart. At Basic, 39 percent. Intermediate had a 76 percent success rate, and Proficient scorers a 97 percent rate. Of course, the respective population sizes means that only 56 percent of adults can read that very basic chart.
From the right angle, are the alligators smiling?
