Little Progress on Adult Literacy

http://www.usnews.com/blogs/on-education/2009/1/13/little-progress-on-adult-literacy.html

An article about education in U.S. News and World Report press stated that George Bush’s literacy program has had little effect in improving literacy rates for adults in the United States. In some states rather than others, literacy rates have either gone down or up, for instance, in Alabama, literacy rates have gone up as opposed to some other states like New York, Nevada and California where literacy rates have gone down. The article also states that with the population increase of the United States, there are more illiterate people; the approximated number was 3.6 million. Future plans for solving the illiteracy program include educating parents about the importance of introducing their children to books as early as possible and recognizing the signs of possible future illiteracy.
There has been unfortunately for the past half a century a tendency to fear intellectualism and to applaud “jocularity” so to speak. We can see this trend in many things from our illiteracy problem to past presidential elections. Many people voted for George Bush because they felt like they could sit down and have a beer with him, basically, a log cabin election. If we ever hope to stop this problem of illiteracy we need to have a paradigm shift as it is to have a positive view on intellectualism as a whole. If we as a nation can encourage people from all walks of life to accept intellectualism as something to aspire to, then we may be able to pull ourselves out of this illiteracy situation once and for all.