Literacy rates falling

Maybe it's the arrival of the first heat or maybe because some people, of whom I seem to be one, feel the juices flow quicker in the spring, I get up early these days – not Harry Truman early at 05:00, God wot! – but early enough to hear the New York Times thump on the kitchen mat. I seize it with great rapidity and not without a spasm of guilt because, whereas I normally turn first to the obituary page to see, in the words of an incorrigible old friend of mine, to see who's had it, I now track through the index and turn at once to the dispatch, sometimes dispatches, from London or Ipswich or wherever, by the correspondents covering the British election.

Why should this alacrity to see how things are going there induce any guilt? Well, on these occasions – elections – I always remember the sorry fate of Sir Lionel Sackville-West in the presidential campaign of 1888. He was the British Minister to the United States, the top man. America did not, then, rate an ambassador.

At the height of the campaign, Sir Lionel received a letter from a man in California claiming to be an Englishman naturalised as an American. He was in doubt about how to vote. Which man, he wondered, President Cleveland, the Democrat, or his Republican challenger, Harrison, would be better for Britain? Such a letter then or now would, in the ears of even a junior official in the British embassy ring like an alarm bell, but Sir Lionel was a simple man or, as an American historian put it later, in a kindly phrase, less than astute. He replied at once and wrote back to California, 'I think Mr Cleveland is the man';Cleveland, the Democrat, who was against the Republican's crusade for a high tariff.

Well, the letter was what they called out west 'sucker bait'. It was not written by an Englishman, naturalised or unrepentant. It was written under a false name by a California Republican. Within the month, the Republicans published the exchange of letters and scattered the text far and wide, most lavishly in the states – New York, for instance – that had a large number of Irish Americans, usually Democrats to a man.

There was a well amplified outcry and much manufactured indignation against Cleveland who was made out to be truckling to Britain and a free trade policy. Cleveland lost. To be exact, he got a hundred thousand votes more than his rival but in the wrong places. He was defeated handsomely in the electoral count and significantly lost the most populous state, New York. He would probably have lost anyway on the hot issue of the tariff but Sackville-West's blunder did him no good. In fact, President Cleveland was so appalled when the correspondence was published, ten days before the election, that he at once, on the same day, ordered that Sackville-West be handed his passport, which was done and the poor man departed.

Whatever sins have been committed by the British diplomatic establishment in Washington in the intervening one hundred years, this is one that the foreign office has never forgotten and each incoming ambassador, whether astute or less than astute, is warned about the dreadful incident.

I've noticed whenever, at the time of a presidential election, I decide to do a little mischievous telephoning, I've noticed that the British ambassador has usually hotfooted it for home or been reported to be out of town or otherwise indisposed.

So, whenever the shoe is on the other foot and Britain is holding a General Election, my own lips are sealed. I resolve not to commit myself one way or the other or even the third way. You will not hear from me the shrewd appraisal of the comparative campaigning styles of Mrs Thatcher and Mr Foot which the New York Times' chief London correspondent attempted the other day. I can only say for now that there is, I believe, more general interest here in the British election than usual, if only because Mrs Thatcher campaigned the first time on a programme and a policy which Mr Reagan practically echoed in his 1980 campaign.

You'll see that after that introduction it will be necessary to tiptoe round the Reagan policies as they are being supported or rebuffed in this country for fear I might be accused – at 3,000 miles – of exercising cunning influence by remote control. Well, there is one issue that, so far as I've heard, is not an issue in British politics, though it's almost certainly a back burner in any English-speaking country that has, within the past generation or so, taken in large numbers of immigrants whose native language is not English.

I guess, literally, that it is, or will become, an issue in Australia. It is certainly burning in the United States and it was brought to the front burner by the publication of the findings of a national commission, roughly the equivalent in this country of a Royal Commission. It was called the National Commission on Excellence in Education. The title of its report suggests that the commission's main concern, after studying all the evidence, was the steady decline from excellence in public education – the title was 'A Nation at Risk'.

Now this complaint is by no means new. For the past 30 years or so, this foundation, that study group and some other fund have been warning and deploring that the standard of competence, never mind excellence, of elementary and high school graduates in reading, in writing, their own language, in mathematics, has been falling to such an extent that functional illiteracy has become a byword among teachers, employers and even school athletic coaches.

Nothing striking has been done about it over the country as a whole, though our spirits are frequently lifted by brisk little television documentaries about a lively experiment in Chicago, some inspired maths teacher in New Jersey, a madcap language teacher in California who starts with no grammar, no exercise books, nothing but emotional situations, like, 'Why were you late?' or, 'If you're hungry, what would you like to eat?' or 'How do you describe the girl sitting next to you?' and has the merry class speaking French in five weeks flat.

The report of this national commission covers the various state systems – education is something that is the responsibility of each state – various city experiments, and looks over the national picture by way of stressing the hazards and deficiencies of all sorts of ethnic groups, especially the blacks and the fairly recent and continuing arrival of, literally by now, millions, if you lump them all together of Chicanos, Mexicans, Hispanics, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Haitians and Asians, refugees mostly from Korea and Vietnam.

There seem to be two sources of this decline. One which affects the majority of American children at school is the acceptance by school authorities of such a low standard in what used to be called 'the three Rs', that graduation from high school is looked on as automatic, however pathetic your marks. How this has come about is a matter of much argument and passionate belief. Some say that throughout the Second War and the prosperous Fifties and Sixties, the American people grew too complacent about America's superior technology, from nuclear energy, the early triumphs of the space age and industry in general. – call it, as we once did, American know-how – that teachers and employers forgot, or neglected to teach, the elements of that know-how that had made America superior in the first place. This argument adduces the shock and the overtaking triumph of the Italians, the Germans, most of all the Japanese, and the consequent flooding of the American market with their products and the arrival, once for all, of a problem that 40 years ago didn't exist – an American balance of payments problem.

On the same topic, the decline of basic education, other people say we're reaping the harvest of the pioneer progressive John Dewey and the theory derived from him, whether legitimately or not, that education is more of a breathless adventure than a grind and that it's better for a child to be taught how to grow a vegetable or learn the history of its own state than bother with such stuff as grammar or the main body of English literature or quadratic equations.

Well, there is something to both these efforts at discovering the cause. What matters, however, is the result and the result is that about 17 per cent of children graduating from American schools are illiterate or, as we now say – I'm not sure why – functionally illiterate.

The other, and the more conspicuous, source of the decline is the feeding into the schools of these millions of strangers – strangers to the land and the language – and this has become so dense and so rapid in some places, in New York City, for instance, that the city law now requires voting ballots to be in two languages and requires bilingual instruction to be given to all children who need it. And who gives the English instruction to Hispanics who desperately need it? Hispanics, who may have been here ten years or less or more and are often not very good at English themselves. This is an immense problem.

At the turn of the century when millions of immigrants poured in from central and eastern and southern Europe, President Theodore Roosevelt practically proclaimed that there must be an end to what he called 'hyphenated' Americans – German-Americans, Italian-Americans, Polish-Americans and so on. The immigrant children were thrown into the swimming pool of English and nothing else. It was the parents who were taught English at night school to catch up with their children.

Well, the national commission says that this, and immersion system, must be done again, otherwise we shall begin or continue to fragment the American people into colonies of many languages and tenacious, old-country habits.

The motto on the seal of this country is 'E PLURIBUS UNUM' – Out of many, one. If the present trend flourishes, it could be turned around. Out of one country, many, which is not a recipe for a strong nation or a united people.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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