I have long maintained that we are not an illiterate country, but we’re an ignorant one. I think that we can read, but we mostly don’t. By not reading (books, newspapers, magazines), we know very little about where we came from and even less about where we are going. We are losing our capacity to be great. From Christopher Hedge’s article, America the Illiterate,
Even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into an image-based existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book.
A friend and I exchanged some witty emails on a recent article about parents wanting to remove their children from an English class taught by a teacher who complained that her students were “frightfully dim” and “disengaged, lazy whiners.” My friend said he hoped for teachers like that in his son’s school. In response to a joking accusation, he responded:
I am pretty elitist. When X graduates high school I’m going to expect him to be able to both fill out an application at a fast food restaurant and make change in his head. That’s how I was raised and I expect no less from my son!
The exchange occurred on the same day I read an article in the Austin-American Statesman discussing the burden placed on colleges and universities due to a high percentage of students who need extreme remedial coursework in reading, writing, and arithmetic (the so-called three R’s.) More interesting than the article itself, however, were the responses. The right-wing pointed fingers at the liberals for thinking money could buy an education and forcing “feel good” policies into the class room. The left pointed fingers at Texas’ cut, cut, cut record when it came to education. No fight about education is ever complete without a few comments about useless degrees (mostly in the liberal arts) that do not prepare people for REAL jobs.
Another friend once told me: Be careful when you point fingers. Two are directed toward someone else, but three are pointing back at you. I felt the force of that adage as I read these articles. One question kept recurring. Where are the parents in all this?
I consider myself fairly well-educated. I received a mostly public education. The school district in my home town was considered first rate. The university I attended accepted only people from the top 10% of their graduating class; the average grade point of entering freshmen was 4.95 on a scale of 5.
Standardized testing indicates my IQ is on the high side, but that had little to do with why I did well in school. The assumption in my family was that I’d damn well better get A’s with the occasional B in subjects at which I was really bad, like Math. Too many B’s, or heaven forbid a C, and my a$$ was grass. Failure was not an option.
I did not come from an upper-middle class, well-educated, Leave-it-to-Beaver ideal family. I was the first member of my family to go to university and among the first generation to graduate high school. My relatives were farmers, day laborers, nurses’ aides, factory workers, contractors, house painters, and three ex-convicts. On our best days, we were only mildly dysfunctional.
Nonetheless, my family had expectations. My mother attended PTA meetings and talked to my teachers. She never helped with my homework, but she made sure I did it. It probably helped that I liked school, but I had cousins who didn’t. They labored under the same parental expectations as I did. My grades earned me free tuition through the Illinois State Scholarship program, but tuition at state schools wasn’t much of an issue in those days. Less than $500 a semester, as I dimly recall.
I’m sure my so-called academic career baffled my family. I have a degree in Rhetoric and minors in Philosophy and Classics. I’m fairly certain those disciplines qualify for the current definition of “useless liberal art” degrees. Even then, my family probably held their breath and hoped my education would prepare me for a nice teaching job. By then, I had a sister-in-law who was a teacher, and she was one of my staunchest supporters. There was a great deal of jubilation when my brother discovered that 90% of Rhetoric majors went on to law school. (What else would you do with a degree in Rhetoric?)
I recall very little pressure to change my major. The only restriction ever placed on me was that I could NOT go into journalism. In my family’s eyes, it was a fairly dicey pursuit. Oh, and BTW, if I was going to major in Rhetoric and minor in those two other things (none of which they had ever heard), I’d better do VERY well, or I was coming home.
As it turned out, my choices served me well. I have always had a job related to them, and those jobs have always paid well. Fresh out of school, I landed my first job writing copy for the local television station (BORING). I progressed to grants writing and fund-raising for a Catholic college. My writing must have been pretty persuasive. Upon meeting me, a priest on the board of a Catholic foundation who had funded one of my grants expressed surprise. He had assumed I was a nun. I was Lutheran and married at the time, but Rhetoric coursework teaches you how to adopt “a voice.” And I did understand Mass in Latin 
When we moved to Texas, my degree led me to the career that I have pursued most of my life: technical writing. A friend wrangled an interview for me with a software company. The personal computer was in its infancy. The company created accounting software, and they really wanted someone with either an accounting or programming degree to write their documentation. They were interviewing people like me because of a new contract with Apple Computer, which insisted they needed to improve the user-friendliness of their documentation.
I took a test where I sat at a Sanyo III personal computer and wrote how to install software on it. I wrote those instructions on a legal pad, because Microsoft Word and WYSIWYG desktop publishing weren’t even in the rumor stage yet. I did what I was educated to do: research, write logically, and prove my point (in this case by testing). I was one of five people they hired. Not one of them had an accounting or programming degree. I was the only Rhetoric major (I’m always the ONLY Rhetoric major); the rest had degrees in English and Journalism. So much for that useless liberal arts degree!
My family was proud. They didn’t know then (and never really figured out) what it was I did all day to make a living. If I tried to explain, eyes rolled back in heads; some fell asleep. I gave a relative a tour of the company where I documented a product called selective laser sintering. At the end of the tour, she asked, “Do you understand any of this? And do you find it even remotely interesting?” They did understand that I was making a living, and it was very comfortable one.
Right before she died, my mother told me how proud she was that I had done so well. She confessed she had doubted my college choices, but she now knew that without my education I would have had a much harder time raising my children as a divorced mother. I told her that I knew I could not have done it without that family foot on my backside.
