[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 16 (Wednesday, February 23, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: February 23, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                               ILLITERACY

 Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, the Chicago Tribune recently ran a 
moving and informative article by E. Annie Proulx ``X Marks the Shame 
of Illiteracy.''
  We need to see that all Americans have the opportunity to learn to 
read and write, and that those who do not read and write well have the 
opportunity to improve their skills.
  I recommend this article to my colleagues and ask that the full text 
be inserted in the Record.
  The article follows:

                    X Marks the Shame of Illiteracy

                          (By E. Annie Proulx)

       For years, I tried to learn something of my father's 
     family, whose hyphenated French-Canadian/Franco-American/
     Native American/New England history was buried in darkness. 
     There were faint gleams here and there, fragments of stories.
       The most impenetrable blackness hid my great-grandmother 
     who died around 1925. All my father remembered was that she 
     had a sour disposition and a mysterious trunk that was always 
     locked. Beyond that, nothing: no photograph, no diary, no 
     letters nor postcards, no favorite recipes, no handkerchief 
     with an initial embroidered in the corner. Not even her name 
     was fixed; on her children's birth certificates it rolled 
     like mercury through variant forms and spellings. No one knew 
     where she had been born or where she was buried. When she 
     died she disappeared utterly. There was no calling her back. 
     It amazed me that a life that extended into the 20th Century 
     could leave so faint a trace.
       One morning this spring I was notified by telephone that my 
     first novel had received the P.E.N.-Faulkner Award. I was 
     still walking on air when, the next day, the mail brought a 
     photocopy of a document dated 1913. The document concerned by 
     grandmother, then 18 years old, and her mother, the elusive 
     woman with the locked trunk; it was the legal form giving 
     parental permission for the minor daughter to marry. The 
     mother's name was on the appropriate line--but in the town 
     clerk's hand. To one side was a crooked, unsure X and above 
     and below it the town clerk's had written ``her/mark.'' X, 
     her mark.
       Until that moment it had never occurred to me that my 
     great-grandmother had been illiterate. All at once I 
     understood the grayed blur of her life, the crazy spellings 
     of her name, for if you are illiterate, what do you know of 
     spelling, even your own name? The only trace this woman left 
     of her passage through life, save for progeny, was that 
     labored X.
       The juxtaposition of the literary award and my relative's 
     illiteracy awakened me to the strange half-life that the 
     millions of people in this country who cannot read are 
     condemned to live.
       In the late 20th Century, if you are an adult who cannot 
     read or write, you are a lump of animate clay pushed from one 
     incomprehensible situation to another. Books are as dumb as 
     rocks, newspapers accusingly opaque; you have to satisfy the 
     natural human hunger for stories with television, bar jokes 
     and radio songs; your job, if you have one, is from the 
     bottom rack and that's as much as you dare expect; you cannot 
     read the home-care instructions the doctor writes out after 
     your operation, nor can you read a vision chart; you can't 
     pass a driver's test or puzzle out a note from your child's 
     teacher; you cannot read bedtime stories to your children; 
     since you cannot read a ballot and cannot make sense of the 
     issues in local or national politics, you don't vote; you are 
     the anxious nuisance traveler who keeps buttonholing other 
     passengers about departure times because you cannot read the 
     schedule; you go to restaurants that feature photographs of 
     food, point and say, ``Guess I'll have that.''
       You sweat blood over application forms--employment, credit, 
     mortgage and loan, licenses, leases, building permits--and 
     have to take along the spouse or work mate to fill in the 
     answers. You're easy to push around because you don't know 
     what rights you have.
       Illiteracy marks you. And you know it. You are acutely, 
     hotly ashamed and embarrassed, and the shame comes out 
     sometimes as a hatred of books and education and smart-ass 
     college types. You hide your dirty secret as long as you can. 
     It may be for a lifetime. It was for my great-grandmother.
       The Department of Education's major study of adult literacy 
     in the United States released Sept. 8, and the similar 
     report, released a week later, ``Reading Report Card for the 
     Nation and the States'' that tested 140,000 students in 41 
     states, shoved some depressingly bleak facts in our faces. 
     Half of adult Americans and roughly 30 percent of students 
     are unable to stumble through the simplest sentences and 
     arithmetic. They are--ugly label--functionally illiterate.
       Liberal helpings of blame for this rampant American 
     illiteracy are being heaped on the usual plates; lousy 
     teachers and a push-'em-through-school attitude; crowded 
     schools and wild, disruptive students; barrel-scrape federal 
     funding; numbingly bureaucratic state education departments; 
     lack of community support; reactionary legislators; know-
     nothing governors; uncaring parents who let their children 
     watch television until their brains rot. The beam of media 
     light rarely falls on the local programs and individuals who 
     sit on the other side of the kitchen table showing nervous 
     and defensive people the way into words, sentences, books and 
     enlightenment.
       There are hundreds of adult education and literacy programs 
     in the United States, some fostered by corporations and 
     employers, some by church or religious groups, by service 
     organizations, non-profit groups, community colleges. Many 
     are funded to some extent by federal and state money, most 
     depend on financing from private and community sources as 
     well as proceeds from bake sales, author readings, raffles 
     and dances. Although the literacy problem is national in 
     scope, the majority of programs teaching people how to read 
     are small, unconnected, grassroots, each with its own agenda, 
     teaching methods and selection of materials.
       Most adult literacy programs start their students out with 
     a private teacher in a one-on-one learning experience, often 
     in the privacy of the student's kitchen (sometimes with all 
     the shades pulled down) until there is enough confidence to 
     join other new readers in this, the most heady and empowering 
     of human skills. Yet hundreds of thousands of people who 
     cannot read never know that such programs exist.
       My own rural state of Vermont, with an estimate 16,000 
     illiterate adults, is strapped for cash and recently cut 
     funding to Adult Basic Education by $100,000. On economic 
     grounds--the common excuse--it chose not to participate in 
     the federal Department of Education's literacy studies, the 
     only uninvolved New England state. Yet the state has private, 
     non-profit adult education organizations of quality and 
     value. Staff members, hundreds of volunteers, business people 
     and employers, rural communities, museums, local libraries, 
     civic and service organizations, private individuals, 
     writers, artists, bookstore owners are involved in the work 
     of literacy, which extends from the first private, sweaty 
     hours to discussion groups and classes, to attendance at 
     public literacy events and involvement in the intellectual 
     life of the community.
       The Central Vermont group (there are others) has 250 
     volunteers; 81 percent of its $710,000 1994 budget will go 
     for direct services to 1,000 new readers. The state and 
     federal governments provide 76 percent of the budget, town 
     tax dollars add another 3 percent and the rest is raised from 
     individual and corporate sources.
       But contrast this small rural state's situation with that 
     of Washington, D.C. In Washington, according to the non-
     profit, all-volunteer Washington Literacy Council, in 
     existence for 30 years, there are 76,000 functionally 
     illiterate adults. There are 400 volunteer tutors teaching 
     adult new readers, and a waiting list of 45 students.
       The shocker comes with the budget. The Washington Literacy 
     Council functions--somehow--on an annual budget of $50,000. 
     Viveca Teuber, the executive director, had her own moment of 
     truth with the fact of illiteracy. ``I used to live on 
     Capitol Hill, behind the Library of Congress,'' she said. 
     ``One day in a drug store a lady came up to me and asked me 
     to read her a card--she wanted to buy a card for her husband. 
     She said she'd forgotten her glasses. It didn't occur to me 
     that she couldn't read. Then, a few weeks later, in a grocery 
     store, a gentleman asked me to read the back of a medicine 
     bottle. I thought, `Why me?'' A few weeks later she became a 
     volunteer at the Washington Literacy Council and began 
     teaching people to read.
       I wish my great-grandmother had had the chance to 
     learn.
  Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. BAUCUS. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mrs. Murray). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  Mr. BAUCUS. Madam President, what is the pending business?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senate is in morning business.

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