Janitors have been fired because they can’t read an after-hours note with special cleaning instructions. Families have been evicted from their apartment when the apartment owner falsely claimed that the rental agreement allows for eviction if a crying baby disturbs other tenants; the evicted tenants do not object for fear that their illiteracy will be exposed. Taking medication poses a danger to those who cannot read the instructions on medication bottles. Children with medical emergencies face life and death situations if their illiterate parents are lost because they cannot read street signs.

These and hundreds of similar “horror stories” happen around us every day, most of them without our knowledge because functional illiterates are extremely good at hiding their illiteracy. The illiterate cannot cope in our complex society as well as they should and must constantly endure at least thirty-four different kinds of serious physical, financial, and emotional problems. Many simple tasks that we take for granted are impossible for the illiterate.

The shocking 1993 report with the title Adult literacy in the United States it was the largest study on illiteracy ever commissioned by the United States government. It was a five-year, $14 million study that involved lengthy interviews of 26,049 American adults statistically chosen to represent the entire American population. He grouped the interviewees into five groups according to their reading ability. The report shows that the median annual earnings were: Tier 1 (the least literate), $2,105; Tier 2, $5,225; Tier 3, $9090 and Tiers 4 and 5 combined, $16,311. The poverty line for an individual in 1993 was $7,363 per year. Strikingly, 22 percent of American adults were in Tier 1 and 26.7 percent in Tier 2. This indicates that 48.7 percent of American adults had median annual income SIGNIFICANTLY below the income level. poverty, mainly due to their functional illiteracy.

The report of a study by the same group that conducted the 1993 study was published in 2006 and shows no significant improvement over the 1993 results.

We do not see 48.7 percent of American adults in poverty because most households have more than one adult employed and because low-income households receive financial assistance from the government (from our taxes) or from family, friends, and charities.

Benefits of ending illiteracy

• You will benefit emotionally if you are concerned that the people you meet are, or will be, functionally illiterate.
• You will benefit if you challenge an average personal cost of $5,186 each year as a result of illiteracy for (1) taxes for government programs used by illiterates and for truancy, juvenile delinquency, and crimes directly related to illiteracy and (2) taxes plus high prices of consumer goods due to illiterates in the workplace.
• You will benefit if you are employed by or have a financial interest in a company or organization in which you invest time or money. Illiteracy affects all organizations to some extent, some severely.
• It will benefit if our nation improves the balance of trade, national relations, and our national employment by improving communication between nations.

The solution to illiteracy

Linguists tell us that Dr. Johnson made a very serious linguistic error in preparing his dictionary in 1755. Instead of freezing the spelling of the sounds of the English language, froze the spelling of words. Therefore, present-day English is based on the spellings of words from the languages ​​of eight nations that occupied the British Isles before 1755.

Professor Julius Nyikos discovered that there are at least 1,768 ways to spell forty sounds in English! There isn’t even an invariant spelling rule in English – some of the exceptions have exceptions! As a result, each word in a person’s vocabulary must be learned, one at a time, either by rote or by repeated use. As a result, many scholars believe that the obvious solution to English illiteracy is spelling reform.

Consider these facts about spelling reform:

• Dozens of scholars for more than 250 years have recommended it.
• Several nations, smaller and larger than the US, both advanced and third world, have simplified their spelling.
• A simpler spelling system has been tried effective in facilitating learning to read in more than 300 alphabetic languages ​​but never tested in English. In 295 languages ​​(at least 98% of them) students become fluent readers in less than three months. Most of the approx. 51 percent of American adults who become functionally literate require two to four YEARS.
• All reasonable objections to spelling reform have been thoroughly discredited by a number of distinguished linguists and educators.
• The need is greater than ever in our increasingly complex world, but it has never been proven in English.

the new book, Let’s end our literacy crisis, details a recently proposed spelling reform called NuEnglish that is scientifically designed to use the spelling of each sound (1) as it is most often written in English, as are 82% of the NuEnglish spelling of sounds, (2) since people wait for a certain sound to be spelled, as in all other spellings, and (3) uses a perfect one-to-one ratio of letters to sounds. Many years of research examining dozens of spelling reform proposals have revealed no other spelling reform proposals that have even one of these characteristics.

To learn NuEnglish, students only need to learn the spelling of 38 sounds instead of the 20,000 or more words in their reading vocabulary. It’s so simple that today’s English readers have learned NuEnglish spelling in about five minutes.

The adoption of NuEnglish will enable about 600 million of the more than 1.3 billion English speakers worldwide who cannot read English very well (more than 93 million in the US alone) to learn to read English in less than three months, as they do in almost all other alphabetic languages. Without the adoption of NuEnglish, according to current statistics, less than two percent of illiterate adults in the US will become fluent readers.

(C) Copyright 2009 Bob C. Cleckler — All rights reserved worldwide