End Illiteracy in English

When people understand the seriousness of the literacy problem, they may be baffled that we have made so little progress in teaching students to read English. Basically, the reason is that too few people realize:

• the extent of English functional illiteracy in the U.S. and in other nations,
• the financial and human suffering cost of illiteracy,
• the great difficulty in learning to read English compared to other languages,
• the near impossibility of solving the literacy problem using the standard means taught in teachers’ colleges: absolutely nothing done since 1755 — when the spelling of words was “frozen” with the issuance of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s dictionary — has made any overall statistically significant improvement in the teaching of reading,
• the vast increase in the need for literacy in our complex society: in the past many manual labor jobs could be done without knowing how to read; today extremely few occupations can be performed successfully without being able to read fluently, and
• how easy it will be to learn to read using the proposal of Literacy Research Associates, Inc. and NuEnglish, Inc., two non-profit educational corporations, for ending English functional illiteracy.

Here is the way to get the details of our proposal in a very authoritative and comprehensive explanation of the facts needed for ending our very real literacy crisis.