WILL LITERACY BE VIABLE IN THE 21ST CENTURY? 

Some editorials are calling for action against "The Illiteracy Epidemic" (U.S. News & World Report, June 12, 1989). Could this be, instead, the first wave of a new visual literacy that will lead to new heights of awareness?

There are 25 million Americans who cannot read or write. Another 45 million are functionally illiterate. More than 25 percent of the population aren't equipped mentally to handle the industrial age never mind the much faster-moving communications age. In Canada the figures may be slightly better but the problem remains. In both countries the multi-language division (French in Canada, Spanish in the U.S.) prevents instantaneous mutual understanding and transmission of information, not to mention the incentive to understand the other language.

Criteria for literacy changes with the times. One hundred years ago, as the agricultural age was winding down, just the ability to write your own name put you in the "educated" class. Fifty years later, as the Industrial age came into full flower, a sixth grade education provided the same status. Today the bare minimum for information-age entry requires reading and writing skills of highschool-graduate level.

To compete and to maintain present levels of influence and affluence, North Americans must come up with innovative, methods, to bring those woefully behind the intellectual levels of today up-to-date and to carry the entire population to higher levels of knowledge. An easy view of the alternative is to witness poor rural peasants grubbing out a subsistance living from the dry, desert soil in the mountains of Mexico and Peru. Remember, at one time their ancestors were the Aztecs and the Incas rulers, the advanced civilization and lords of all their then-known world. Such a downfall could happen again. As Mortimer B. Zuckerman, Editor-in-Chief of U.S. News & World Report points out quite correctly ".. in the post-industrial era, when the majority of people in the work force make a living with their minds, not their hands, it is education -- more than coal or steel or even capital -- that is the key to our economic future".

Meanwhile, in Japan I.Q.'s of over 130 are common now among ten percent of the high school population. Literacy has reached new heights and communications and utilization of information have become commonplace. With a relatively homogeneous native population their citizens speak but one language in their homeland, hence communications are faster and more comprehensive.

Yet, it is not time for total dispair. We may have an unseen advantage: robots are programmed to speak via phonetic spelling (any self-respecting robot will ignore "laugh" for "laf"). I have found the best young programmers are kids who can't spell. They naturally spell phonetically. What was once a liability becomes an asset in another age!

Dry static book knowledge can no longer compete with dynamic visuals in an age when pictures travel at the speed of light. The U.S. Army has found this out. Poorly educated (in the old sense) military personnel are now being rapidly upgraded, via interactive video discs to competent technicians capable of operating highly sophisticated electronic systems.

More is approaching the horizon. For some years now I have had what looks like a hippie headband that picks up my alpha and beta waves and via this biofeedback allows me to turn on my computer, tell it to run a program and command my computer to print. Today a wire runs from the headband to the computer and its peripherals. Tomorrow that will not be necessary.

My satellite dishes have a device known as a LNA, a low-noise amplifer, which takes the very faint signal (quieter than a snowflake falling) from outer space (36,000 kilometres away) and amplifies it up to 200,000 times. I get all the color, pictures and sound required. Imagine a modification of such a device perhaps the size of a hearing aid, that could amplify your thoughtwaves. You could command your bulldozer to move mountains. Right from your easy chair. No spelling necessary.

I suggest a different look at print illiteracy: perhaps what we are now seeing, when Johnny and Mary can't spell, is a better way to find knowledge levels viable for the 21st century.

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