According to do something.org, "1 in 4 children in America grow up without learning how to read."
In a country with schools everywhere, this is an unbelievable number. And we don't really have an excuse as to why things are this way.
In earlier times, I can understand why you would have only a small group of people that could read or write. After all, these are images of essentially the same thing, and yet, their direction is different, the detail changes, and apparently there can be more or less in terms of letters depending on where you get your information from.
But today, our alphabet consists of only twenty-six letters. That isn't very many. In fact, it's harder to remember the Declaration of Independence than it is to remember the alphabet, and typically in America we learn those things at the same time.
So why are there so many people that can't read?
The unfortunate thing is that we really don't have an answer. Some people just fall through the cracks: even though they've been going to school somehow they manage to scrape by without actually being literate, not ever getting help to improve that skill. Some people don't have the means to get the additional help that they need and so they never put the effort into reading and writing. And, difficult as it may be to believe, especially in California, some people just aren't going to school.
There isn't one clear answer as to why people can't read or write. But statistically, those who can't read have a higher rate of being jailed than those who can. Which, for me, is where I come back to the ancient times and the fact that so few people could read. Obviously we, humans, managed to get through centuries with only selective literacy. And while these older societies weren't perfect, the inability to read and write didn't correlate quite so strongly with the chance that a person was going to commit a crime.
Which brings me to the one question that I cannot answer:
What changed?
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