Helping Johnny Learn to Read Is Top Priority

“There are estimates that 20% to 25% of the blue-collar work force in the auto and steel industries is illiterate,” says Anthony St. John, vice president of human resources for Chrysler.

St. John, who has worked 23 years in industrial relations, made that statement in a speech last week in Michigan--while also reporting that Chrysler and the United Auto Workers had set up programs to teach employees to read.

The unsettling thing is that the news comes as no surprise. The statistic that 20% of all American adults--not only blue-collar workers--can’t read is widely quoted to illustrate the failure of the schools.

The problem is an old one and has not yielded to massive doses of money. Total U.S. expenditure on education last year--local, state and federal--came to $308.6 billion, or more than the nation spent on defense. Just as with defense, the people recognize that education is necessary but sometimes question how much is enough.

The question is not facetious. Warnings about education have been sounded for so long, they’re losing credibility. Five years ago, a national commission called America “a nation at risk,” yet the economy has recovered from recession and created millions of jobs. Could the case for education be overstated? How much, after all, do assembly workers have to know?

The case is anything but overstated, and workers today must know more all the time because modern industry piles responsibility on their shoulders. Working with robots and computers isn’t pushing buttons but knowing how to make the hourly chartings demanded by zero-rejects, quality-first production. It takes high levels of literacy and numeracy.

Schools ‘Slag Heaps’

And beyond the assembly line, education is crucial because ideas weigh more than iron ore in our gross national product. Alan Greenspan, a noted economist before he became chairman of the Federal Reserve, has put that thought well. “Early in the century when processes were mechanical, and you built with stone and steel, a year or two of high school sufficed to do the work,” Greenspan says. Now silicon chips and computer programs--the ideas of engineers--guide glass and plastic building parts into place, “and you can’t do much for the GNP these days with a strong back.”

OK, but if we need education, and we’re paying a bundle for it, what is wrong? Many things. The bureaucratic problems that hobbled U.S. industry, plus poverty, family breakdown, race prejudice and the system itself. A report last week by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching found urban schools to be a slag heap of crumbling masonry, unmotivated students and stifling bureaucracy. It recommended smaller schools, teacher autonomy and stricter supervision.

Some cities didn’t wait for a report. In Rochester, N.Y., a powerful effort to reform the schools is uniting the school board, teachers union, major corporations and the local university.

Rochester is paying teachers more but going beyond that to work individually with students and parents.

“Today, 27% of our children drop out of high school,” says President Kay R. Whitmore of Eastman Kodak, a prime mover in the Rochester program. “With a growing need for skilled labor, I believe we’ll not only have people without jobs, but jobs without people.”

A costly waste. “One dropout costs about $4,600 a year in higher social spending and lost taxes,” Whitmore says. “Over a lifetime, each class of dropouts costs the country $240 billion.”

It sounds extreme, but Whitmore is only putting in dollars and cents the thought expressed long ago by historian C. W. de Kiewit in his “History of South Africa.”

“It is one of the simplest axioms of economic thought,” wrote De Kiewit, “that the whole of society suffers when any important group within it suffers from inadequate use of its intelligence, or wasteful organization of its labor.”

De Kiewit knew the score. More than 20% of the U.S. work force is suffering from inadequate use of its intelligence, and--have you noticed?--America’s competitiveness has slipped and its standard of living is threatened.