End Illiteracy in English

Conventional wisdom is anything that a very large portion of the people in a certain area believe. Conventional wisdom may or may not be true. At one time almost everyone on earth believed that the world was flat! At present in the U.S., it is conventional wisdom that our educational and political leaders are making the best choices possible in teaching our children how to read. We believe this because we want to believe it, because we do not know what should be done differently, and because most of us do not have the time or the knowledge to do anything other than leave it to the “experts” — in the same way that we leave complicated home repairs to the “experts.”

There is one almost universal characteristic of the educational and political experts, however. They act in accordance with what they learned in teachers’ colleges or law school — they do not often “think outside the box.” As you well know, educational and political leaders almost never push revolutionary ideas. They are afraid their constituents will object to something that is too different. They usually accept revolutionary ideas only when they are pushed into them by angry voters.

Whether it is conventional knowledge for you or not, English functional illiteracy is a very serious problem. The most accurate definition of functional illiteracy is the inability to read and write well enough to hold an above-poverty-level-wage job. Almost all U.S. adults can read a thousand or so simple words they learned by sight in the first three grades in school, but if that is all they can read they are functionally illiterate.

Fully 48.7% of U.S. adults are functionally illiterate. Furthermore, 31.2% of these functional illiterates are in poverty, and they are more than twice as likely to be in poverty because of their illiteracy as for all other reasons combined. If you find that hard to believe, you are challenged to investigate our end English functional illiteracy website to see the proof and to see the revolutionary change necessary to solve the problem. You will find why this is true and why we do not see this level of illiteracy and poverty. This revolutionary change is needed because absolutely nothing done in the last 90 years has made an overall statistically significant improvement in the English literacy rate. Most importantly, you will find the proven way of permanently ending what is truly a literacy crisis.