Literacy in America

Many people think that going to a grocery store and buying the groceries for the week is just another tedious thing to do on their to-do list, but for someone who is illiterate they can’t even make a to-do list let alone read it. For an illiterate, reading street signs, warning labels, and even the newspaper is a struggle. As a society growing in the use of technology, the amount of illiterate Americans is far too high. In the video clip “Education and the Future of Technology” it states that they are prepping the students of today for jobs that they haven’t created yet. For people who are illiterate, this means they have almost no chance in the upcoming competitive society. They won’t stand a chance with the new technologies that will require an immense amount of knowledge, knowledge that if they could read, would be easy to acquire. In America illiterates can take the learners permit test orally, but even if they pass where will they go and how will they know how to get there? Grocery labels, bills, the words Ambulance, Police, even Fire are all words that cannot be read by an illiterate. This means that sometimes illiterates have to call 9-1-1 because they don’t know who else to call. In the article The Human Cost of an Illiterate Society written by Jonathan Kozel he described a situation where a man’s car had broken down on the side of the road. The man called the police and they asked him where he was. As he looked around trying to find some type of street identification that he had seen before he finally found one, it read one way street. He told the police officer, but there wasn’t much he could do. There were many one way streets in the area. This is just one of the struggles that illiterates have to go through. Putting more stress on getting an education will help the number of illiterate people decline.

As a kid growing up in the society that is becoming more and more based on technology, I would want to be able to make it in corporate world. As stated...