A NEW REMEDY FOR AN OLD EVIL

Of the many evils contributing to our present array of social problems, none is more dangerous than illiteracy, which not only is wide-spread in the United States, but is rapidly increasing. Many of our labor troubles can be directly traced to the appalling prevalence of this evil; it is largely responsible for the existence of our defective and criminal classes; it multiplies agitators and radicals; it is the cause of thousands of industrial accidents.

According to figures recently published in the "Scientific American", ten percent of our population is illiterate in the absolute sense of the term,--that is, unable to read a word in any language. Of the million boys who attain the age of 18 each year, 50,000 do not speak any English at all; 200,000 have had as little as two years of schooling, and one half that number have had only one year. Those who reach the sixth grade average approximately 500,000, while barely 100,000 ever go through high school. Thus a large percentage of young men start work with entirely insufficient training.

Added to these are the illiterate aliens who are constantly growing more numerous. Last year we had two and a half million foreigners who could not read a word, even in their own language; there are many others who are classed as illiterate because their native script or letters are different from ours and who therefore find the English language unintelligible. When we consider the half-illiterates, those who are scarcely able to sign their name or decipher words--and our unschooled negro and white population, we have the alarming total of more than 25 million, or one quarter of our entire population, who can contribute little or nothing to our national life.

It is estimated that seventy percent of industrial accidents happen to persons requiring an interpreter in filing their claims, many of whom are unable to read a danger signal or safety sign; $250,000 is reckoned as the daily cost of these accidents. In the draft, nearly one-third of the picked manhood of the country was ineligible for service due to incapacity to understand the most elementary instruction.

These figures are most significant. They are, perhaps, incomprehensible to people who read of the numerous and apparently popular evening schools that have been instituted in most communities. Yet these schools have not proved a success; the chief reasons for their failure are faulty methods of instruction and attendant inability to hold the student's interest, fatigue of the worker from the day's exertion, and family obligations. There seems but one remedy,--the installation of public, school classes in the actual places of employment, where workers can secure an hour's instruction each day as part of their working time. More than one thousand of these schools are already in operation, Chicago alone having several hundred. The universal adoption of such a system would be the foundation of a serious effort to combat the insidious danger of illiteracy.