Literacy Expert Calls for Federal Aid To Help Grass Roots Reading Groups

The federal government must pour billions of dollars into grass roots reading programs in order to end adult illiteracy in the country, an award-winning author on the subject said last night at the Cambridge Forum.

Jonathan Kozol '58, the winner of the National Book Award in 1968 for "Death at an Early Age" and the author of the widely-acclaimed "Illiterate America," told an audience of 100 that presently the government is spending only one-tenth the amount needed to solve the literacy problem.

"The total direct federal allocation for the problem since 1980 is at 100 million dollars. Divided by the 25 million illiterates in the country, it comes to four dollars per illiterate per year," he said.

"We need to allocate 10 billion dollars. It would be allocated to grass roots groups close to the neighborhoods which have the largest number of illiterates," he said. "These would be truly based in the communities with the communities in control of the governance."

Government sponsored reading programs such as Adult Basic Education while well-intentioned, currently have dropout rates as high as 40 percent, he said.

"Reading skills will be shared best in a truly warm and neighborhood setting. Anything else will deter illiterates," he said.

The widespread nature of the problem has tremendous economic consequences for the country and may cost the nation as much as 100 billion dollars a year in reduced productivity and welfare payments to illiterates locked out of the job force, Kozol said.

"The loss in G.N.P. from people who can't work and therefore do not produce and only consume is the cost I would emphasize to the present administration in Washington," Kozol said.

However, the more important effect of illiteracy to Kozol is its impact in human terms.

"It does bring me to tears to see so many people who have so many stories that will never be told, so many songs that will never be sung, so much beauty that will never be shared," he said. "That's a cost that will never be found in The Wall Street Journal, but ultimately may be the greatest loss of all."

"The standard argument for increasing literacy is to beat the Japanese by building up our competitive edge," Kozol said in an interview last week. "Literacy advocates rarely talk about literature. But is it too much to think that poor people might like to read other things than rule books?"

Kozol's interest in literature began as an undergraduate at Harvard, where he was a member of the Advocate and wrote his senior's honors thesis on "Hamlet."

He won the Rhodes Scholarship and went to Oxford University after graduation.

But before his first year in England was finished, he left. "After four years at an Episcopalian prep school, and three years at Eliot House, I had spent so much time with people pretending to speak like Englishmen that my arrival at Oxford was disconcerting," Kozol said. "I thought everyone there was a fake. Then I realized that was how they really spoke."

After spending time in the literary world of Paris, he returned to the United States in the early 1960s and taught reading as a volunteer to children in Roxbury, a low-income section of Boston.

By the time he was 27, Kozol became a permanent substitute teacher for a fourth grade class in Roxbury, a post that allowed him to teach regularly without the required teaching credentials.

"Those kids were as bright as the kids I grew up with. It was purely an accident of birth that they were so far behind." Despite the fact that most of his fourth grade students were lacking in basic skills, Kozol began teaching them the poetry of Langston Hughes and Robert Frost.

When school officials learned what Kozol was teaching, he was fired for "curriculum deviation." Thinking back on his dismissal, Kozol said last week, "I think the students suffered because of the symbolic bitterness of having just lost a teacher who had put poetry, and poetry written by a Black man, in their hands."

Based on his experience in Roxbury's public schools, Kozol wrote "Death at an Early Age."

He has since taught in the Newton public school system and has helped organize community learning centers in several economically depressed areas of Boston.

Grants from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations during the past seven years enabled Kozol to do the research that culminated in the writing of "Illiterate America," which was published last year.

"This book marks the consolidation of the two previously disconnected strands of my life--the love of literature I developed at Harvard, and the love of social justice I learned in Roxbury."