What you are quarreling with is not any "spin" that I'm putting on literacy. It's the understanding of literacy provided by the organizations that conducted the National and International Adult Literacy Surveys, according to which mean literacy levels in the United States do not differ much from most OECD nations, though they do not match the outstanding achievements of Sweden, and the gap between the most and least literate is the widest in Portugal and the United States -- an index of educational and socioeconomic inequalities in these two nations (cf. <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20050228/004475.html>).
It should be also noted that Sweden, the most literate nation (whether measured by its mean scores or its proportion of individuals functioning at Levels 4-5) according to the IALS <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20050228/004475.html>, allows the highest proportions of the individuals functioning at Level 1 (72.3% of Swedes at prose literacy Level 1, 70.1% of Swedes at document literacy Level 1, 63.5% of Swedes at quantitative literacy Level 1) to get in the top 60% of earners (in the United States, only 13.4% of Americans at prose literacy Level 1, 16.6% of Americans at document literacy Level 1, and 12.2% of Americans at quantitative literacy Level 1 are in the top 60% of earners). See "Table 4.9ac: Percent of Population Aged 25-65 at Each Literacy Level Who Are in the Top 60 Percent of Earners, 1994-1998) in Annex D of "Literacy in the Information Age: Final Report of the International Adult Literacy Survey" (<http://www.oecd.org/publications/e-book/8100051e.pdf>, 2000, pp. 173-174) for detailed information. A nation is best judged by how it treats its least, which happens to be in accordance with the best wisdom of organized religion, put in the Bible thus: "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me" (Matt. 25:40).
In my view, one of the useful skills of what might be called functional political literacy in the modern world is an ability to look at sensational stories ("50% of the U.S. population aged 16-65 is functionally illiterate!" <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20050228/004433.html>) reported in the corporate media that target lay audiences, which supposedly are merely reporting on the findings of scholarly studies, and to look up the scholarly studies in question and see if the scholarly findings are accurately reported by the media or exaggerated or misrepresented by them. That's a skill that should be taught in high school. But that's not an essential one.
The most important element of functional political literacy -- the ability to read any story (whether told in words or numbers) in class terms and ask, "Is it good for workingmen and -women?" -- cannot be taught in school. Only rich working-class culture, cultivated over time by successive waves of class struggles and social movements, can teach that. That is why, in the United States, the least formally educated (many of whom are probably functioning at Levels 1-2 in terms of National and International Adult Literacy Surveys), especially the least formally educated Blacks, are on the average also the most literate -- whether on domestic or foreign policy questions -- in terms of my definition of functioning political literacy. The annual household income of $50,000 is roughly the threshold: below it, Americans tend to be politically smart, above it, Americans tend to go politically dumb. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>