Essay On What Are The Consequences Of Illiteracy On A Societal Rather Than An Individual

Illiteracy has a potentially enormous societal impact in Canada. Because some sort of literacy is a basic assumption of many areas of lire in the twenty-first century, illiteracy has a far greater impact on society now than it may have done two hundred years ago, as we shall see. Its biggest social and economic impact is on the poor, condemning them to poverty and to a lack of social mobility, and with the risk that the problem will be passed on to their children, who will thus remain trapped in a vicious cycle of the illiterate underclasses.
People who are illiterate suffer economically in all sorts of ways that Kozol describes and often exemplifies with anecdotes or with direct quotations from illiterates. In grocery stores, illiterates cannot take advantage of special offers, because the food they buy is often identified by the image on the label and the most recognizable labels are not always the cheapest, so they do not have access to the cheapest food. Illiteracy will also severely limit their employment opportunities, because they are trapped in jobs which require no reading skills and these jobs are often the worst paid. They may not be able to understand (because they cannot read) what government benefits they are entitled to, thus worsening their economic situation. Illiterates cannot read legal documents and are therefore vulnerable to manipulation if they rent or if they try to buy their own property, or if they sign any sort of insurance or hire purchase deal. Kozol claims that illiterates do not know who to trust, and, therefore, trust nobody. Illiterates cannot read bills or final demands and, because they rarely know how to use check accounts, they cannot order products by mail or over the internet, thus effectively meaning that they are likely to pay more for whatever products they purchase. Even using phone directories can be a challenge and so time and energy may be wasted in searching for specialist shops physically, rather in the phone book or online.
One huge societal danger is that illiteracy may become, as it were, hereditary. Even if the children of illiterates are able to read, their parents will not be able to communicate effectively with the school, may be intimidated even by going to the school to visit teachers, and cannot read to their children or help them with their homework. This may man that the children of illiterates can under-achieve educationally and face similar employment problems when they are older.
The health of illiterates and their children can be seriously affected. They will not be able to read the health warnings on tobacco products or have meaningless access to the advice sheets on healthy eating or lifestyle which may be found at many medical centers. They will be unable to read the ingredients on food packages or instructions in recipes and so their health may suffer directly through poor diet. Preventative health advice often comes in written form and is effectively denied to illiterates. Even emergency situations of life and death may threaten illiterates or their children since they will not be able to summon the correct emergency service or, if they are away from their home, they may literally not know where they are – unable to read street signs and direct ambulances to the right location.
According to Kozol, illiterates are trapped in the ways already described – economically, educationally and in terms of health, but they can also be physically trapped in the sense that they rarely leave the neighborhhoods they are familiar with, because of their inability to read street names or road signs. This leads to a narrowing of horizons with illiterates frightened to explore their region or its cities because of the risks of being lost or the inability to read a map: this surely has an effect on their children by narrowing their sense of who they are and where they live – in terms of their immediate locality, their province and the whole of Canada. Even public transport presents great difficulties for illiterates who may waste time and money because they cannot read the signs outside the windows of whatever vehicle they are travelling on.
Socially illiterates are trapped too because their inability to read leaves them unable to make a properly considered choice about what to watch on television or see at the cinema or which restaurant they can afford and would like. In Canada too, whether Anglophone or Francophone, illiteracy denies citizens access to our written cultural heritage and, by extension, to the impressive literary cultures of both the English-speaking and French speaking worlds. Therefore, illiterate people are culturally impoverished and less able to take part in any part of national culture which involves the written world. This cultural impoverishment may also have general effects on their educational achievement and that of their children – denied access to a rich and shared societal culture.
In conclusion, it can be seen that illiteracy has far-reaching and damaging effects on a societal level. Kozol frequently describes illiterates as ‘trapped’; it could be argued that they are impoverished in almost every aspect of social life – even leisure and culture – but, are also, as we have seen, victims of economic, educational, health and mobility impoverishment. The challenge for any Canadian government is to ensure that literacy rates keep on rising, but that may involve increased spending – a difficult choice in the current recession – but one that is surely worth it to ensure real freedom for illiterates in our society.