The Quantum Literacy Theory.

Reading is the fundamental literacy skill. At the outbreak of the second world war when virtually every able-bodied man in the UK was conscripted in the armed forces, our generals discovered to their horror that one man in five was unable to read. The seriously dangerous munitions which these men were required to handle and take into battle, came with printed operating instructions which 20% were completely unable to read and this led to so many embarrassing disasters that one general is on record as saying that he felt in greater danger around his own men than he did around the enemy. Needlessly to say, this widespread illiteracy among the population was kept a closely guarded military secret.
Now seventy years later and in spite of massive annual investments running into hundreds of millions of pounds, the literacy situation is astonishingly, unchanged. About 20% of children still leave school less than functionally literate. A well funded andf professionally managed EU study in 2000 revealed that one person in five in the UK was unable to read correctly, the dosage on a child's medicine bottle! It is difficult to understand how this situation can exist in a country which teams with Educational Psychologists, Literacy Consultants, Remedial Advisory Teachers, Specialist Literacy Teachers, Special Needs Co-ordinators and Teaching Assistants, yet exist it most certainly does.

A major contributing factor in the failure of our expensive Education system to deliver the ability to read to one fifth of the population is the failure of the great and the good in Education, to agree a professional definition of what reading is. As a result of this failure, every teacher of reading has their own perception and therfore, their own idiosyncratic definition of what reading is. This means that when professional educators discuss reading, they are all taking about different things because there is no professionally agreed definition. Imagine the kind of chaos that would result if doctors were left to define medical conditions idiosyncratically!

Anyone involved in the business of solving problems knows that first step in solving any problem is to cleary and succinctly define that problem. Teachers however, appear to be wholly unconcerned with the absence of a professionally agreed definition of reading. One teacher once told me, " We don't need a definition of reading. We just know what it is!" Some regard reading as a wholly mechanical activity and some as a wholly intellectual activity. If those who teach our children to read were paid by results, I think this horrendous situation would be resolved very quickly. But they are not paid by results and the results are attrocious.