LITERACY IN UNITED STATES

Waihi Daily Telegraph, Volume XVII, Issue 5608, 3 May 1919, Page 2

LITERACY IN UNITED STATES

7.000,000 CANNOT UNDERSTAND ENGLISH. “Indefensible indifference to civic responsibility on the part of the average American,” was charged by Franklin K. Lane, Secretary of the Interior, at a dinner given in his honour recently m New York, by a number of men and women interested in the Americanisation of the foreign-born population of the United States. Mr Lane based his charge on the fact that statistics show that there are to-day more than 7,000,OCO persons in the United States above the age of ten years, who can neither road, write, speak, nor understand the English language. A report winch. Mr Lane recently presented to Congress showed not only that 7,ooo,oo(J~nhabitants of the United States cannot read or'writ© English, innalso that 18 per cent of the nation’s children are kept cut of school, that many thousands of them are taught the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech in Go:man, that the average school teacher receives less pay than the average clay labourer, and that twice ns mud) money is spent,an.nually in the United States for chewing gum as for schoolbooks. Referring, again to that 7,000,000 of the nation’s people who do not know the language of the country, the English language, Mr Lane said that 1,500,000. oi these were not of foreign but of native birth. Also he announced that of the men who were drafted -into the army of the United States, some ‘2OO 000 out of the first 2.000,000 could neither’ read their orders nov understand them when delivered. Another fact which seemed to many a discovery, he continued, was that the man-power of tho country was deficient,because its education was deficient, and finally that Americans have* failed to see the United States through the eyes of the people who have come to this country, have failed to realise why they came here nrd what they sought, and also to understand their definition of liberty.